Games Night News

Chocolate on the felt!

2012-03-15T00:39:00.000Z

No, this is not a new euphemism for really needing a poo, but is in fact a reference to Steve's giant faux pas as he clumsily broke an aero bar into splinters over Joe's smart green baize-substitute table cloth. The embarrassed brushing of crumbs off the table was as swift as it was apologetic.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Five of us arrived at Joe's kitchen and we tried not to be disturbed at the pile of girls' hair in the corner. Myself, Sam, Steve, Anja and Joe (of course) were in attendance. We decided on a game off Joe's list of games he'd bought but not yet played: Hansa Teutonica. This had been suggested as a gaming option so often it was starting to feel like an in-joke: Joe suggests Hansa Teutonica, we all chuckle and choose something else instead.

But this week, we decided to give it a go. Joe patiently talked us through the rules and, although we weren't quite sure of the right strategy, we set about building routes and taking control of cities in Germany in the olden days.

It was a lot of fun, and taking control of the right cities paid dividends to those with foresight. I went for biggest network and a multiplier which, luckily, no one noticed until the end. Steve complained a lot about not understanding the rules, but was quickly in the lead alongside Sam.

But although I got bonus points for a particular route, I missed out on some other choice pickings, which left me just short of first. Sam luckily asked for clarification of a rule as the points were counted up which gained him enough points to avoid a draw with me and claim first place all for himself.

Sam 51
Andrew 47
Steve 41
Joe 39
Anja 33

As a nightcap, we decided on a quick round of 6nimmt. We tried to spice up the proceedings by talking in Italian "goomba" accents, until Joe pointed out that the mafia almost never play 6nimmt. We complained when we were dealt high cards, and we complained when we were dealt low cards. In fact, the only way to win the game is to be dealt no cards at all. But that's not an option so we struggled on.

It turned into a very close game in the end. Steve came in a poor last in the first round, but played well enough afterwards to bring himself up to second. I looked like being stoney last until I managed a clear final round. On the down side, Anja went from challenging for first to ending in last in the space of one round. Such is the cruel nature of 6nimmt.

Sam 36
Steve 47
Andrew 51
Joe 62
Anja 69

Thanks to Joe for a very enjoyable night. Hansa Teutonica was a success, and worth playing again now we know what everything does.

Meanwhile, it's an increasingly congested form table this week, with four gamers on eleven points. Amazingly, despite Sam's great performance, he stays on eleven points, but creeps up a place thanks to having a better more recent score. By the same method, Steve and I leap over Adam into third and fourth respectively. Anja, meanwhile, manages to fall to the bottom of the class, even below the mostly-absent Hannah.

						Points
Quentin	1	3	1	1	3	9
Sam	1	1	4	1	4	11
Steve	2	3	2	2	2	11
Andrew	3	2	2	2	2	11
Adam	3	3	1	3	1	11
Jonny	3	1	3	5	3	15
Joe	4	4	1	3	3	15
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20
Anja	5	5	4	4	3	21

First we were Henchmen, now we are Luddites

2012-03-13T00:35:00.001Z

Despite Sam's double feature of gaming over the weekend, the fact that this week's games night has been put back by one day clearly left a gaping hole in his game-diary. As such he texted me this afternoon for a quick evening of games.

I arrived after a disastrous attempt at life-drawing to find his kitchen table resplendent with his own creation: Luddites! It was a game of Sam's own making, using a tower to send players' dice scattering across the game board at random, either supplying bountiful crops, or knocking down any signs of technological advance (hence the title Luddites).

At first we played with commentary from Arsenal vs. Newcastle on Radio 5 in the background. But when we realised that one of the players seemed to be called Santa we decided the comedy possibilities would distract us from the game on the table, so we turned it off (actually he was called Santon but we didn;t know that at the time).

Luddites uses a rondel to limit player choices to the next three options around the circle. You have to build up resources for selling on the market and building factories that bring in extra goods, while at the same time trying to trigger a tax round to hurt your opponent*. The factories are actual wooden silhouettes of buildings that can be knocked down by the rolling dice. These buildings then need to be repaired which cost money, and so it goes on.

It was pretty interesting, with rules being changed on the fly, as we realised that triggering a tax collection should get people more victory points to make it more appealing, since nobody likes taxes. And also that the market didn't quite work. Either the market was too generous, or too stingy. This needs a little work, but it can be fixed. Also the tower needs a smaller gap to put your dice into. Since Sam and I are both honest gentlemen who equate cheating with murder, we dropped our dice in dead centre to optimize random results, but the opportunity for cheating is too great for other less upright members of society who may drop their dice in towards one side to favour a particular outcome.

With these issues faced as we go, it was an occasionally tense and strategic game with certain possibilities. The market is the major thing to be addressed and we discussed various options during the game. We ended the game with:

Sam 51
Andrew 43

Or something like that. Possibly 53 to 41. Not sure.

Then we played Stone Age. I thought it'd be quick with only two players, but it comfortably took us towards eleven o'clock. I didn't take a note of the scores, but both of us were in the two-hundreds and Sam won by thirty points. Points that I'd have gained if I'd got a 3x hut multiplier instead of Sam. He picked it up in a typical "Hillman" move, just to spite me even though it didn't help him. And it worked.

But Stone Age is a great game. Putting all your men on gold still raises goosebumps on player and opponents alike, and that's what this game is all about. Gambling, but with opportunities to change the odds. Roulette could learn a thing or two from Stone Age.

* And possibly yourself. Hey, that's taxes, man.

Life in the Hotel Arosa

2012-03-12T11:38:00.004Z

You know if you can't get your wives to play games with open invitations, one must use subterfuge. To that end, Joe and I arranged a dinner on Saturday evening at my house and underwent lengthy nods to polite society in the form of conversation, food (cooked by Sally - I'm shameless), glasses of wine, et cetera. But of course at some stage we had to get a game on the table, and our pre-arranged plan* meant that Joe was the one to propose it.

*Our pre-arranged plan was actually Joe suggesting it and me being too scared to, suspecting Charlotte secretly loathes me for introducing Joe to Settlers of Catan about 5 years ago. You know the rest.

I would have tried to work up to such a daring proposal, but Joe, his self-respect long-since burnt to hell in a household of game-skeptics, just came out with it. But as it transpired both Charlotte and Sally had been primed, and were resigned to indulging their goonish husbands... And so we played Mord im Arosa, the game where players listen out for the sound of tumbling wooden cubes in order to solve a mystery, and then accuse each other of the murders.

I'm not great at this game, as my method seems to be instantly forgetting anything I've just heard and guessing wrong, meaning more of my cubes go in the tower, and subsequently being more open to accusation. Sally and Joe, having played before, were alive to this in-built ratio, but Charlotte blew us all out of the water by constantly predicting where her own cubes where and eliminating all but the most minimal suspicion of her on the investigation sheet. Sally came in second, Joe third, and I was last, implicated as the most inept murderer ever, leaving my bloody fingerprints on the banisters as I made my way down the fire escape.

On Sunday we had Mark and Katie over for tea, and so the games commenced fairly early. I'd been hoping to show them The Downfall of Pompeii, but Katie had a hankering for Trans America. As that's fairly quick, we managed to squeeze in two other games as well.

We started with No Thanks, which was new to everyone but me. The rules are simple, though, and everyone was quickly up to speed. Especially Mark, who ran out a clear winner. Tactics now slightly clearer, we had another game, which I can't remember who won (I think it was Mark again) but Katie played a very nice final round, letting the card she wanted collect about 20 coins before picking it up as everyone cursed her chutzpah. She and Mark both liked this, whereas Sally was less enamoured of it, being innately suspicious of numbers.

Then we played Trans America as agreed, and despite Katie's first-round error of announcing her connections when she still hadn't reached Kansas City, it was another strong showing from the Chiseller. We ended after two rounds with Mark beating Katie by one space on the score track, Sally third and me way out in last place.

My gaming chops feeling particularly droopy, I wasn't confident of winning Mord im Arosa but was looking forward to playing, guessing that Katie and Mark would like it. And they did, though with some reservations. There's something intangibly confusing about the rules that disconcerts everyone on first play, and that was the case here, but after an extended search for the second corpse (who still seemed curiously mobile) we slowly got to grips with it, and were soon accusing each other like old hands.

I finally won a game too, despite leaving several clues next to the victims. We had thrown so many cubes in searching for that second victim that we had implicated ourselves on almost every floor - though of course, we still managed to do the odd sloppy investigation too. Mark was second, Sally third, and Katie was the murderer.

So a weekend of gaming came to an end and I hadn't, as far as I knew, alienated anybody. Katie and Mark were even talking about buying Trans America/Europa for themselves - and Katie mentioned again her temptation to come to Stabcon in January. We must work fast, friends, as going to StabCon too soon might be a tactical error. She doesn't joke about meeples yet or know who Dirk Henn is. The best tactic is to let the geek grow from within, so confronting a hundred hairy fat men quoting Blackadder will seem an inconsequential side-show to the pleasure that is gaming...

Pitch Cars and Jack Tars

2012-03-06T23:50:00.000Z

Actually, Jack Tar is a sailor, not a pirate, but it's late...

As we enter the last month of the season, five eager players arrived at Chez Sam for the night's entertainment. Adam was to have been there but he had to attend someone's birthday do. A fact he only learnt during the email exchanges on Monday to ascertain who was going to turn up.

We began in a light-hearted mode with a game that Sam received as a birthday present that's suitable for small children as well as adults. Me, Sam, Joe and Quentin decided to play Pitch Cars while waiting for Jonny. In this game, you have to flick wooden disc "cars" around a track. It began jovially enough, but before long our innate competitiveness crept in.

Suddenly, we were lining up shots like snooker players and cursing our luck on unexpected kinks in the road or a crash barrier. In fact, during our two races Joe and Sam managed to get stuck for three goes in one place. The winning tactic seems to be get in the lead and then don't make any mistakes.

Race One
1. Quentin
2. Andrew
3. Joe
4. Sam

Race Two
1. Sam
2. Andrew
3. Quentin
4. Joe

During race two Jonny arrived so, after we finished, we settled down for something a little more involved. We chose newbie Rum and Pirates. Sam explained the rules – except for a brief interlude where he had to go and clean up some cat sick – and we leapt right in. To the game. Not the cat sick.

This game based around a pirate's life (beating up guards, politely declining invitations to the pub and having ~~pillow~~ fights for best sleeping places) is a lot of fun. When Sam and I played it a week or so ago, it did seem as if it would be more fun with more people. And it was, but perhaps five people was too many. It turned out to be quite a long game. I wasn't sure about any tactic, but going to the pub seemed to be a good move. Again, I did badly getting good sleeping berths in the ship, which might have been costly.

I miscounted the number of rounds and thought the penultimate round was the last. So I ended round four smugly with a move that completed a treasure map and set me up for a decent result. When I learnt there was another round, I didn't really know what to do. As it was, we ended with a dead heat, even after a recount. Joe scoured the instructions for a tie breaker, but none was forthcoming, so we rejoiced in their joint victory.

1= Quentin 73
1= Joe 73
2. Andrew 67
3. Jonny 61
4. Sam 53

It's a whirl of excitement on the form table as Quentin leaps from seventh to first. Adam holds on to second despite not turning up, and both Joe and I improve our standings. Jonny's score goes down by one because he got rid of that pesky decay point.

						Points
Quentin	1	3	1	1	3	9
Adam	3	3	1	3	1	11
Sam	4	1	4	1	1	11
Andrew	2	2	2	6	1	13
Joe	1	3	3	5	2	14
Steve	2	2	2	4	4	14
Anja	4	4	3	1	2	14
Jonny	3	1	3	5	3	15
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Winging it

2012-02-29T15:25:00.004Z

This week, with James and myself a lot better a regular dosage of games was in store. James had only just recovered from coming off large doses of steroids and therefore didn't fancy challenging his brain to learning some of the new games I had awaiting introduction. We settled for the mind-bending, if easy to remember, Mr Jack as James had really enjoyed his last session with it.

It's not really a game that allows you to be too rusty though, especially if your opponent has had some recent games. (As I had). Therefore after the first round my detecting skills had reduced Mr Jacks alibis to three. And by round three I had him bang to rights and off to county jail along with Sally Decker.

On the return bout I managed to stubbornly keep at least four suspects in the light until the last two turns when it whittled down to two. James was stymied even further as I kept all of the other characters so far away that he couldn't even make a guess. Turn 8 finished and Mr Jack had eluded capture!

We then broke out Carcassonne : Discovery, where scores became tight right at the end but James had done enough to pip me 94 to 86.

Then to Tuesday night. After showing Paul all the new games I had we decided to play last weeks hit Thurn and Taxis. Paul was fast out the blocks again taking the first carriage cards and plopping down post offices in good strategic places. I had opted for a different tactic and began to link up some of the more tricky to get locations and generate longer connections. This paid dividends for me when by a stroke of luck I made a chain from Saltzburg to Lodz and suddenly realised I could take the top bonus for all outside territories. After that I didn't look back as Paul's routes began to look a little more meandering.

Chris - 40

Paul - 29

Although this game took longer than we thought it would we still attempted to learn a new game. Airlines Europe was given to me by my good lady wife for my birthday. A recommendation that that came from Sam (And Joe by extension).

This is an old game brushed up and made new. Designed by Alan R Moon of Ticket to Ride fame, it's a game that takes place over the skies of europe. Because of the Moon connection and the map with interconnected cities some people mistakenly believe this game to be TTR with planes. It's not like that at all. This game is all about buying more stock of an airline than your opponent and pushing up the price, hoping they don't then obtain more than you do. The map and the little planes serve nothing more than level indicators to show you how much you now have to pay for stock.

Aargh! Look at that massive hand!

There are a few similarities to TTR; like the stock deck which functions in the same way as the carriage cards, but all in all very quick to pick up and fast to play. And it needs to be because there a few stock cards to get through before the final scoring card comes up (In a Alhambra style the 3 scoring cards are placed in the deck).

The components are lovely even though I had to mark the wings of the orange planes because they looked like the red and the money was a bit thin.

We quickly ran out of time and didn't do the final scoring correctly but Paul pipped me in the end and we resolved to play it first next week.

Paul - 89

Chris - 85

Troyes, Troyes again

2012-02-29T00:04:00.000Z

This evening we had six gamers around the kitchen table. Despite our recent extra-curricular games, Sam and I were still excited at the prospect of another games night. Joe, Adam, Steve and Anja made up the rest of the gang. Jonny was going to be here, but couldn't make it at the last moment.

With six of us, we played Mord Im Arosa. This game of gravity-based sleuthing was new to many of us, but it was swiftly explained and before long we were hunting up and down the seven-floor hotel looking for clues or trying to cover our tracks. With more than two-players, it's quite a different game and does need a little more concentration that before. However, late in the game a detached flap on one of the floors caused a blockage which made sleuthing easier than you'd otherwise expect, which pushed someone over the "ten suspicious cubes" limit and ended the game.

1. Anja 10
2= Sam 11
2= Andrew 11
3. Adam 14
4. Steve 15
5. Joe 16

After this, we split into a group of four and a group of two. Joe and I played Troyes (and I found out that the only reason he gave it to me for my birthday was so he'd have someone to play it with) while the others settled down with Portobello Market. I'll leave it to them to fill in the details of their two games, but the scores were

Adam 105
Steve 95
Anja 82
Sam 65

And in the second game...

Sam 106
Steve 84
Adam 82
Anja 79

Meanwhile, Joe and I reintroduced ourselves to Troyes. I discovered a couple of rules I hadn't got right first time round, but I think my recent practise helped me. Joe started by pushing me out of my positions on the buildings, so I got fewer dice, but with only four rounds it didn't seem to make too much difference. And even if I do say so myself, I made some canny decisions in the final round. When the victory points were counted up, I found that I'd won by the slimmest of margins.

Andrew 33
Joe 32

Since it was still early(ish) and we'd all finished our games at the same time, we reconvened for another six-player game. This time, 6nimmt was brought out, and despite its confusing rules (at least until you play it) and Sam's instance it should be called 5nimmt, since you take five cards and leave the sixth, it was a fun game.

Despite his previous good form, Adam did badly from the start but quickly recovered. My form dropped dramatically after the first round, while Sam managed to dodge most of the damage being given out to the other players. By the end, we admitted that no one really had a strategy and Adam said that he did worst when he tried to plan ahead.

Sam 20
Steve 31
Adam 45
Anja 47
Joe 49
Andrew 66

So five games and four winners. And hats off to "Second Place" Steve for his consistency, which sees him up to third with Anja hot on his heels. Despite picking up a sixth place, I stay on the same number of points, while Joe falls due to his habit of coming in fifth.

						Points
Sam	1	1	4	2	1	9
Adam	3	3	1	3	1	11
Steve	2	2	2	4	4	14
Anja	4	4	3	1	2	14
Andrew	6	1	2	3	3	15
Jonny	1	3	5	3	3	16*
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Joe	5	2	5	2	4	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

* the decay rule –people with five results registered, after a while, will find their score go down one point per week if they don't attend for three weeks. It may sound harsh, but it stops the regulars getting resentful. If they attend another evening, all decay points are removed.

Meanwhile, I've been keeping the old style leaderboard up to date. To be honest, it's suffering from the same trouble as last season. Sam is leading with 101 points, Joe is second with 86, Adam has 78 and then I'm fourth with 65.5. After that it's the usual large gap to fifth (Steve, 38.5).

However, the Olympic style leaderboard is looking much more exciting, with a real three-way battle for supremacy. Joe may have fallen to eighth in the form table, but he's still in the running here. And form is transient. Medals last forever. If we gave out medals, that is.

The Olympic leaderboard...

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Sam	8	10	1
Joe	7	4	6
Adam	6	3	6
Steve	2	4	0
Andrew	1	4	7
Anja	1	2	1
Jonny	1	0	5
Quentin	1	0	1
Hannah	0	1	1

Beer and Home-Taping

2012-02-28T10:23:00.006Z

Having missed last week's regular Tuesday meeting, and with unsullied cardboard in the cupboard, I was unwilling to wait another night for my regular fix and wanted to get sullying. Andrew was similarly inclined, and joined me for a game of Rum and Pirates last night as we, slightly illegally, listened to Andrew's birthday mix CD.

Rum and Pirates is a Stefan Feld game but not one of huge regard - it doesn't even make it onto his wikipedia page. That's right. I checked. Perhaps that's because it's extraordinarily silly theme - not the Pirates themselves, but the fact that the game takes place in a kind of pirate retirement village, where they all get drunk, fight with the guards and piece together treasure maps whilst following the Red Corsair around the place like a bunch of besotted schoolboys - then fight with each other over who gets to sleep in the hammock on the ship, despite there being numerous hostelries available onshore.

The other reason might be the badly written rules, which are so repetitive they feel like an experiment. We started fairly late, and when we turned to the double-page spread on how to fight over the sleeping berths (which is actually quite straightforward), I was ready to pack it in and play Stone Age instead.

But I'm glad Andrew persisted, as the game, for all it's fiddly bits, is actually rather simple and quick-moving. On your turn you move the Red Corsair to an intersection on the map and, as long as you have enough pirates in your supply to follow him there, you pick up what he finds and keep it for yourself. If you want to pay a gold coin you can repeat the action, as many times as you have coins. The resources at intersections might be part of a treasure map, or a gold coin, or a fight with the guards, or a few other options including inviting all the players for a drink and squabbling over the available 'honour points'.

For honour points, not treasure, is how you win this game. Pirates, of course, don't actually have much use for treasure when they have it, as the most they'll ever do with it is buy a round in the pub before starting a punch-up. But the getting-of-it is obviously important to them, in one of the silliest games I've played in a while.

After the initial disdain of the rulebook, and the slightly underwhelming board not winning our hearts, this was actually a lot of fun. Heavy on the luck, to be sure, as combat is down to the roll of a dice - which in most instances favoured me last night, as I ran out the Most Honourable Pirate with 72 points to Andrew's 61. But as Joe keeps saying, "dice are in!"

Let's play it again! Tonight!

Four games in a day, and not a leaderboard in sight

2012-02-25T23:15:00.000Z

I spent a tranquil afternoon as I played through a game of Troyes by myself, just to get an idea of how it works, with Final Score on the TV to keep me company. And, despite Garth Crooks' increasingly theatrical sighs of dismay at Newcastle vs. Wolves or whatever, I enjoyed my first walkthrough of this dice-based game (but in a good way) of disaster-management.

Soon after that I got a text from Sam about a impromptu games evening, and so before long I was sitting at his kitchen table, complete with red and white polka dotted tablecloth (not a patch on Joe's green felt, frankly) learning another new game.

We began with Portobello Market. In this, one has to build up market stalls along streets and then score them according to the customers (normal, aristocrats or the baron) with an option to score districts, too, which scores big but can reduce the number of actions you can do in future turns. In the first game, we were just warming up, unsure of any tactic.

Sam 195
Andrew 180

On the second go, we were a little more canny. We paid more attention to the position of the policeman (which lets you place market stalls) but it was still too early to fully compute the role of the baron, who appears automatically when the last customer is placed on the board. Is it worth leaving a space on the board where you are strongest, hoping that he'll drop into your lap on the last go? Or should you play safe, use an aristocrat and get the points early? Such is life for the Portobello market-stall holder circa 1901.

Sam 209
Andrew 200

After this, we decided to squeeze in one last game. Mord im Arosa. In this game, players have to solve a murder using only their sense of hearing. Cubes are dropped into a cardboard tower and by listening, each player has to guess where the murder took place. A wrong guess means the player has to add their own cubes to the murder scene, which increases the odds of them being unveiled as the murderer.

It's a silly game and a lot of fun. I turned out that I have quite the aptitude for this game, as my guesses regarding the location of Sam's suspicious cubes was unerringly accurate. The game ended with a large enough margin of victory for the heinous crime to be solved.

"Solid Alibi" Andrew 5
"Blood on his hands" Sam 14

Both games were a lot of fun, although would probably be more so with more players. Especially Portobello Market which has potential for quite a bit of Analysis Paralysis if four are playing, I think.

Through a Brass Darkly

2012-02-22T01:39:00.000Z

When I arrived, I was given pancakes and a seat at the family table. What a happy start to what was to be a long evening. Since we were just three (Joe, Adam and myself) we chose our favourite on-line distraction: Brass. Although Martin Wallace's game is more like a collection of rules that don't fit together properly, we still found it had an allure that we couldn't resist. And so we donned our imaginary stove pipe hats and mutton chops and stood around, clutching our lapels and moaning about price of building t' cotton mill.

The first thing we noticed was how rusty we were regarding the rules. We were used to the internet dealing out cards, giving us money and telling us when we couldn't do things, so it took a while to get going. And then, once we were going, it took a while to keep going.

I went for my usual shipyard tactic which I think I've got down to a fine art (three out of four shipyards built). That fact that I still came last is the final nail in its coffin. It don't think I'll be going for that strategy again.

Really, the evening was between Adam and Joe. I wish I'd taken notes of what they were doing because, thinking back, I have no idea. They looked at the rule book a lot. Maybe that helped.

At the halfway point, I was in the lead, but that was thanks to my network of canals which get removed at that point. I started the second half with few industries on the board, while Adam had plenty of buildings scattered about. Joe trod a path somewhere between us throughout the evening.

By the end, Adam must've been confident in winning since he was giving both me and Joe advice so we could end sooner. Even with that help, we completed the game at quarter past midnight. We were a little older (by four hours, to be exact), a little wiser and quite a lot puzzled as to how it took so long.

Adam 204 (a new high score!)
Joe 184
Andrew 165 (and a personal best for me)

Adam leaps up the form table thanks to losing a fifth place result and replacing it with a shiny new first place.

						Points
Sam	1	2	1	3	2	9
Adam	1	2	1	4	2	10
Joe	2	4	3	3	1	13
Steve	4	4	1	1	2	13*
Jonny	1	3	5	3	3	15
Andrew	3	3	4	2	3	15
Anja	2	2	4	4	5	17
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Still in the Dark...

2012-02-17T16:44:00.005Z

On Thursday night I found myself at Chris' house, breaking the journey on an early start in London the next day. As we're both grown-ups we spent at least 8 or 9 minutes catching up before breaking out a nice two-player, Mr Jack.

This Jack-the-Ripper themed filler (filler in the sense of duration rather than frippery) was a big hit with us at StabCon as the ease of learning/substantial depth/clandestine nature combination seemed to stack up into a hit, a palpable hit. The game is usually fairly short and as I was yawning already (it was 10pm) we agreed to a couple of games, so each of us could have a turn being Mr Jack, and a turn catching him. Thematically that's about as chillingly hedonistic as you can get.

I was Mr Jack first and I was stumped from the first turn, when - Chris having taken one of the four available cards - I was left with two that it made sense to take together, and the third being (unbeknownst to Chris) Mr Jack - in his day job as Dr Watson. I'm not sure why I couldn't see a way out of this initial predicament, but I never recovered my sense of evil cunning, and Chris closed in for a third round arrest.

Swapping roles for the second game I felt the tension lift slightly - it's still a game that requires a lot of concentration, but it feels marginally less stressful as the detective. However, having made 99% certain that I knew who Mr Jack was (or Ms, in this case, as Mr Jack was spending his days in drag as Ms Stealthy) I paranoically hung back, obsessing over that 1%, and made the novice policeman's mistake of leaving your prime suspect over an open manhole at night-time. Sure enough, Mr Jack - or whatever her name was - made his escape, and Chris picked up another win.

After my 4-game salvo at StabCon I was disappointed to be twice turned over, but I was reminded what a brilliant two-player this is - like chess, as Chris' friend James pointed out, it has few rules but immense depth in terms of the possibilities (for error!) in each round.

I wonder if we could come up with a four-player variant...

A Thurn for the Wurst

2012-02-15T14:39:00.002Z

Seeing as it is the vogue to try and make the report fit the title I thought I'd give it a go. This week Monday games night was shelved due to James' and mine separate illnesses. Tuesday games was also in jeopardy as it fell on Valentines and I still hadn't fully recovered. A combination of delicate negotiations and effective cold cures saved the day. Poor Jacquie you might be thinking, and yeah you're probably right.

The "Thurn" of the blog title does indeed refer to a new game for us Thurn and Taxis, which had a little history to it before I could get it to table. I had wanted this game for quite a while. Good reviews, Spiel des Jahres winner, high Geek score and playable with two made it a nailed on purchase. However when I did get to the shop I managed to somehow walk out of it with the expansion instead. Undeterred, I quickly logged on to Amazon and ordered a copy. Unfortunately this time I didn't play close enough attention to the description and ordered the German version. Luckily the BGG has wonderful people that supply the rules to these things and I was able download one.

I'm glad I had Paul with me when I went through them though. The second line on the translated rules was, "A rough translation" and that proved to be the only really accurate statement on it. Somehow however Paul managed to pick his way between my confused utterances to work it all out claiming, "It's a bit like a cross between Ticket to Ride and Web of Power."

Paul's understanding of the rules appeared to help him. As I was tentatively making my way from Stuttgart to central Germany and claiming a nice little route I suddenly noticed Paul had Post Offices everywhere! He started off in front and never looked like slipping behind.

The final tally was closer than I expected
Paul 32
Chris 26

After having low hopes reading the rules I found I really enjoyed the game and I expect it to have high replay value.

This was our second game of the night as we started where we left off last time with a game of Alhambra. With the scoring rules better understood Dirk didn't stand a chance. This game we also made better use of our reserve which allowed me cement my first place by adding another tower right at the death.

Chris 160
Paul 143
Dirk 78

Take that Dirk.

Nein Danke please, we're British

2012-02-14T00:04:00.001Z

Due to Valentine's Day, games night was moved forward one night this week. This meant for the first part of the games night, I was absent. So while I was struggling with some life drawing, Joe, Adam and Sam struggled with Condottiere. Although I wasn't there, Sam told me that he blames his poor showing on a mistake. After Joe had passed Sam believed he'd won and withdrew a card. But this then left him weaker than Joe, allowing him an early win. As it was, this was enough of an advantage for Joe to continue his run of good form and take the win.

1st Joe
2nd Adam
3rd Sam

Then I arrived at just the right time, and I sorted myself out while Adam was taken through the rules of The Downfall of Pompeii.

We began by suspecting that Adam's innate gaming sense would give him an advantage with this game's unique "populate, then de-populate" mechanism, so he was the initial target of any sacrifices to the volcano. Then we noticed Joe had a lot of people on the board, so he became Public Enemy Number One. After a short while, we saw that Sam was in a strong position, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. I snuck by without anyone noticing.

Sam 9
Andrew 8
Joe 7
Adam 6

After this, a new game was brought to the table. 6Nimmt (which means "Take Six", according to the internet) which is a cross between Poison and Sevens. We tiptoed through the apparently simple rules, but Adam obviously had a better grasp than the rest of us as he ran out as a winner with perhaps the largest winning margin that GNN has ever seen.

Adam 1
Sam 50
Joe 61
Andrew 70

With three games under our belt, we were keen for a fourth game to be played. So, as a nightcap, No Thanks was brought out. The predominant feature of this game is for other people to mock my apparent lack of understanding of the strategy of the game, as I happily pick up low-scoring cards with coins on. But this time, for once, someone else had a weaker plan than mine. Which means, of the three players that laughed at me for picking cards up voluntarily, only two had any justification. To avoid any shame on his part, the name of the third player will not be revealed.

Sam 27
Adam 39
Andrew 46
Joe 62

On the form table, Sam reclaims top spot, while Adam is in serious danger of dropping a place down to an unthinkable fifth.

						Points
Sam	1	2	1	3	2	9
Joe	4	3	3	1	1	12
Steve	4	4	1	1	2	12
Adam	2	1	4	2	5	14
Jonny	1	3	5	3	3	15
Andrew	3	4	2	3	4	16
Anja	2	2	4	4	5	17
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Up Pompeii

2012-02-07T23:19:00.001Z

Tonight was all about Italy. I arrived early, and was introduced to a quick two-player game called Ponte del Diavolo. This simple game of bridge building and land reclaiming is simple to learn but difficult to master. There's plenty of scope to stymie your opponent, while trying leave yourself with enough options so you don't become the stymee to your opponent's stymer. For the record, Sam squeezed past for the win, 21 points to 18.

By this time Jonny and Joe had arrived and a new game, The Downfall of Pompeii, was unveiled. This was Joe's birthday present from Sam, and with a pedigree like that hopes were high. We got the Frankie Howerd impersonations out of the way early, and then Joe talked us through the simple rules. The game goes through two phases: re-populating the city of Pompeii after an earthquake that struck in 62 AD, and then evacuating the city again after Vesuvius erupts in 79 AD.

All through the game, each player has ample opportunity to cast other players pieces into the plastic recreation of the volcano, through various Omen cards, or by drawing out lava tiles in the later stages of the game. This was a lot of fun, even if it was a shame that lava didn't flow diagonally.

The first game was a closely fought affair, possibly due to us not knowing the correct strategies. Joe came out first on a tie-breaker, and Jonny snaffled third from me in the same way.

Joe 8 (6 in the volcano)
Sam 8 (8)
Jonny 6 (12)
Andrew 6 (13)

On the second game, we were all a little better prepared, but the random ways of lava cannot be predicted. At the risk of sounding like a moaner, none of my lava tiles hurt my opponents. Meanwhile, a well-drilled lava-aware population were able to get out in greater numbers than before. And this time, not even a tie-breaker could separate Joe and Jonny, who took joint first place.

Jonny 11 (8)
Joe 11 (8)
Sam 10
Andrew 8

An excellent game, accompanied by Sam's generous helpings of cheese on toast. I enjoyed this evening a lot. Even Finn the cat kept his plaintive mewing to a minimum. Meanwhile on the form table, Joe advances to a commanding lead, while Sam falls to joint second with Steve. Jonny leaps two places to fifth.

						Points
Joe	1	1	2	1	3	8
Sam	2	2	1	5	2	12
Steve	4	4	1	1	2	12
Adam	5	3	1	1	3	13
Jonny	1	3	5	3	3	15
Andrew	3	4	3	2	4	16
Anja	2	2	4	4	5	17
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Ripping Yarns

2012-02-03T11:01:00.004Z

So the bi-weekly Bracknell meet ups arrived again as had the promised new games. This week us board gamers had the new titles, Mr Jack, Thurn and Taxis and Alhambra to choose from. It would have been four with Mammut but that hadn't arrived yet.

I was really eager to give Mr Jack a try after reading so many good reviews and I quickly read the rules and took a mock turn before setting off to James' house. One good aspect of the game is that it is relatively rules light, although it takes a turn or two to get your head round what is happening (Like pretty much all games I guess). In our first bout I took the reins of the detective and James, Mr Jack. In the early turns Jack managed to stay in the light (witnessed) along with most of the supporting cast until the detective realised that it might be a great idea to whittle down the suspects. At this point Jack changed tack and went to the dark side (No Witnesses), thus giving him the ability to escape if he could manufacture the chance. The cat and mouse antics continued until the 7th turn when the detective, with only one option left, managed catch him and reveal his identity Scooby Doo style .

In our second game we fell foul of not noticing one of the characters special abilities, with me as Mr Jack, had wandered into Dr Watson's lamplight. When the call for witnesses was made neither of us noticed and an incorrect call was made. The error was noticed next round but it was too late. It was a bit blooming obvious who Mr Jack was now, so we started again.

This time, still playing Mr Jack, I started appallingly and by turn 3 I was down to 3 suspects and turn 4 down to 2. I changed my tactic and drove both unseen characters to the exits. The dilemma was enough to let my Miss Stealthy nip down a drain and out the unblocked exit. If Mr Jack had been any other character he wouldn't have had enough moves to escape and that would have been it!

Overall a very enjoyable experience, although James noted that the game played out in a similar fashion to chess with each player deep in thought or waiting, not wanting to distract the other.

On the following day Paul arrived without his usual funny observation of something that happened on the journey in. Not letting this get us down we proceeded to peruse the new games. Unfortunately Thurn and Taxis would need to be left for another day as I had contrived to buy the German version of the game and didn't want to hunt around for the English rules. I pressed forvMr Jack again as I could relate the rules quickly due to last nights gaming.

The first game Paul played detective and straight away seemed to have got the hang of it. Mr Jack was left clinging on until the 8th turn when he could do nothing to escape Sergent (sic) Goodleys draw. In the return fixture the detective managed to eliminate most of the suspects by mid game however Mr Jack had adroitly managed to escape being further whittled down, until 7th turn when Doctor Watson dobbed him in.

Then onto Alhambra where it seemed like Paul and I were in a battle to beat Dirk (The 3rd non player). There wasn't much in this until the third scoring round saw Dirk disappear into the distance with his Kew sized garden. Paul then employed Dirks help by giving him Towers, which I was ahead in. The subsequent tie meant that second place actually scored more and Paul cleaned up.

Paul - 122

Dirk - 102

Chris - 81

Beaten by a Non playing character. Balls. (We may need to look that rule of second place up, it seemed unfair but we played it consistently through the game and couldn't change).

Help me, Rondel

2012-02-01T00:03:00.002Z

The Stabcon Five (me, Sam, Joe, Adam and Steve) reconvened for a mini-games convention at Sam's house this week. With this line-up in mind, Sam and I made an executive decision to choose Navegador as the evening's main course. This game of opening trade routes to Japan was a hit at Stabcon, and I was certainly keen to try it again. As people arrived, no one complained about the choice, but Adam did have to sit in the corner so he had enough room to put his chips on the table.

In this game, your choices are made according to a rondel – a circle divided into eight sections, around which you can only move three sections at a time. Therefore, you have to be careful you don't go past an option if that's what you need in the next turn.

My tactic for this game was simple: To go around the rondel as slowly as possible. I suspected that there was a logic behind the arrangement of the sections, so I only went one or two spaces at a time until the very end. Joe played an intriguing game, barely having any ships on the sea at all, he capitalized on churches, workers and factories (obviously a Portuguese Protestant). Adam seemed to do what I was doing a lot of the time. Sam complained about having no money, while Steve tried to spread his influence across many categories.

The game ended when I discovered Nagasaki (in my black ships! Hurrah! History is vindicated!), and we found that Joe's strategy paid off, giving him a clear first place. I came in second, just ahead of Adam. Steve snuck past Sam on shipyards, but neither seemed terribly happy with their strategy. Sam especially rued his lack of money early on in the game.

Joe 112
Andrew 88
Adam 83
Steve 75
Sam 61

After this, a game of High Society was suggested. Given that two people present – Adam and Steve – have never been totally au fait with Reiner Knizia's counter-intuitive bidding game, but we decided it should be a leader board anyway. Early on, Steve picked up a –5 while the rest of us paid big to avoid it. For my first card, I chose to go for a "lose card", hoping for a bit of luck in future cards. That luck didn't arrive, and Sam and Adam were able to get 8 and 9 cards respectively. In the end, Steve scored in the minus points and Joe and I scored no points at all, but despite that, we didn't come last thanks to Adam's lack of fiscal prudence.

Sam 8
Joe 0 ($28m)
Andrew 0 ($26m)
Steve –10
Adam $least

On the form table, Sam and Joe battle for first place and, despite a middling performance, Steve edges ahead of Adam.

						Points
Sam	1	5	2	2	1	11
Joe	2	1	3	3	2	11
Steve	4	4	1	1	2	12
Adam	5	3	1	1	3	13
Andrew	3	2	4	3	3	15
Anja	2	2	4	4	5	17
Jonny	5	3	3	3	4	18
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Chair Bears and Wood Pushers

2012-01-24T23:38:00.005Z

Five GNN regulars arrived for this week's event: Joe, Sam, Jonny, Adam and myself. We began with Sam's new, intriguing card battling game, Condottiere. Sam and I had played this game only last evening, and found it interesting but a little simple for a two-player game. With five of us, it was a different prospect completely. Although Jonny missed the first round, since we hadn't done much we decided he could jump right in.

The battle was much longer with five players, and it ebbed and flowed as players who fought their way to an early advantage in a round then had to sit cardless and watch everyone else fight over areas they wanted. In the end, Adam won by cleverly linking three of his territories via a slim land corridor that some other players hadn't seen.

Once he'd been declared leader, there was a certain amount of debate about where the rest of us came. With some discussion about the merits of having adjacent territories or having more but disparate territories. In the end, the final placings were:

1 Adam
2 Sam
3= Andrew
3= Joe
3= Jonny

After this, we chose an old classic to end the evening. To our surprise, Jonny had never played Seven Wonders, so it was quickly explained to him. One can't expect a newbie to challenge seasoned campaigners such as us, and that's how it turned out. Any further reference to the rules was made more complicated by Finn the cat's decision to sit in the box while we played.

As for tactics, I miscalculated and let my strong position go to waste due to a lack of resources in round three. Joe expressed disappointment with his easy-to-build wonder of the world. Sam went for war and a bit of science, which almost won the day. But in the end Adam won by one point with the completely hypocritical strategy of military might and religious blue buildings.

Adam 56
Sam 55
Joe 46
Andrew 42
Jonny 29

At the end of the evening, with the realisation that Adam had won both games, we grimly noted that "Adam's back" before heading home. But the form table doesn't lie (unless I've done my sums wrong). He may have closed the gap, but not enough. Meanwhile, Jonny and I score exactly the same points as the points we lose, and so we stay where we were.

						Points
Sam	2	2	1	1	2	8
Joe	3	3	2	1	1	10
Adam	1	1	3	4	2	11
Steve	1	1	2	5	5	14
Andrew	4	3	3	2	4	16
Anja	2	2	4	4	5	17
Jonny	5	3	3	3	4	18
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Meanwhile, the title refers to two potential nicknames for board gamers suggested during the evening. Which one are you?

Italy, the 16th Century

2012-01-24T09:53:00.006Z

Plagues of battle-hardened Italians jostle for power in a land made of several city-states that sometimes ally themselves, and sometimes fight. It's a dirty, dirty war, full of intrigue, death and well-dressed smart-alecks.

London, the 21st Century. The complex time described above has been neatly packaged up in a teeny cardboard box and labelled Condittiere, after the manipulative bastards who led the mercenary armies. Having read the rules and found their brevity to my liking, I invited Andrew over to play last night.

The game is fairly simple. As players you're representing the Condittieres and trying to occupy a certain number of regions on a map of Italy to win - with two players it's 6 regions, or 4 adjacent ones. And to do so you simply line up the mercenary troops (valued 1-6 in the main, but there are some much-valued 10's as well) from your ten-card hand and try and outscore your opponent. Having done so, you place a marker in the region to say it's yours, and having been occupied, that region may not be contested again.

But wait. What sounds like a rather ambitiously themed Top Trumps game is made more subtle with the 'special cards'; of which there are many. The Bishop gets rid of the highest-level mercenary on display, the Scarecrow allows you to nab a card back into your hand (either having bluffed someone out of play or to save it for another day if you foresee defeat). The Surrender card allows you to end a battle immediately - and somewhat perversely, win it, if you have the strongest troops on show. Those crazy Italians, eh!

There is also Winter and Spring cards that can weaken or strengthen troops, the Drummer doubles the power of any mercenaries, the Courtesans who add a bit of power to your army but more importantly, if you have the most of them, allow you to choose the next battleground, and finally the Heroine, who scores ten and is kind of unstoppable, unaffected as she is by any of the other special cards.

There's also a 'Favour of the Pope' counter that protects an unoccupied region from battle (which you move by playing a Bishop) to add a little extra smattering of strategy.

We were intrigued. Aesthetically there's a weird imbalance between the Renaissance-art of the cards and the slightly ugly board. Mechanically we liked the speed of it, and the fact it can play up to six. But for two players it felt a little bit luck-heavy - sure, you can be as canny as you like early on, but if you're fighting over a region that will win somebody the game, it can basically come down to who has the best hand - which was how it felt as Andrew won the first game and I the second. I think though, with 3 or 4 players this downside would be negated, as there'd be more than one person trying to stop an imminent victor.

We also played Citadels, which I won by being a sneaky mo'fo.

Sam 36

Andrew 22

Laser Quest

2012-01-18T15:06:00.010Z

Due to a cock up on my part where I bought the expansion for Thurn & Taxis, and the inability of the Yodel delivery man knock on a door even remotely loudly, my promised new games were not in evidence. Paul took the news manfully and considered that we might give A Few Acres Of Snow another try. Even though we played it maybe 8 weeks ago half of the rules were missing from our collective memory. It's not a game that is taken out of the box and played within 5 minutes of recap as it has special rules for a lot of things and, as last time, we found that we played a few rules incorrectly before it was too late.

Fate dictated that I was to play the well positioned but impoverished French and Paul took on the British dandies. Both sides began filling up their respective decks with all kinds of great sounding cards without really fixing on a strategy. Indeed this game seems to the inexperienced player one where you sort of make it up as you go along and hope for the best. Paul decided that he was going to be a pain in the French underbelly with multiple raids all along the rapidly expanding front line. I, however, tried to muster as much military as my puny funds would allow. It was around this point that I realised I'd only been taking one money for trading furs, something I'd done a lot. Then just as Paul and I had traded a couple of speculative sieges the clock chimed 10.30. (It didn't. My clock doesn't even have chimes. It does tick though. It's something Jacquie had before we met. It doesn't go at all with our kitchen décor…)

Where does all the time go? Having a couple more goes each we totted up the scores.

Paul 43

Chris 46

A narrow mid-game win for the French but really it was nicely balanced at that point.

On Monday I also resumed games with James. We had a game of Stone Age which I won but afterwards he brought out a new game that he had received for Christmas, Khet. For those that don't know it is Egyptian Themed laser chess. Your board is made up of a grid of squares and in two corners opposite each other is a piece which fires a real laser. (Tesco style not James Bond). You then have a two types of 45 degree mirrored pieces, one which has a single mirror and a solid back and the other has two mirrors back to back, these can swap places with an opponents piece. There are three non mirrored pieces and one of these is the Pharaoh (King) and this is what you are trying to hit by clever placement of mirrors. You can knock out your own pieces so it is a real head spinner.

I sucked at it and lost both my games pretty quickly. I would like to play it again though.

Wanna get in on the brown action?

2012-01-18T00:03:00.003Z

Six gamers perused the games cupboard tonight: Sam, me, Joe, Jonny, Anja and Steve. Adam was off sick, perhaps the excesses of Stabcon finally caught up with him.

We split into two groups of three. Joe was keen for more dice action and so he, Steve and me decided on a game of Lords of Vegas. Sam, Anja and Jonny chose Tinners' Trail for their evening's entertainment. I'll leave it for one of them to fill in the details of their game later.

But on the other half of the table, it was all about glitz and glamour as the three of us engaged in turf wars over some prime real estate along Sunset Strip. I made the early running, thanks to a purple casino that paid out a lot early on, but before long my tiny little two-square casinos weren't doing it any more, and Joe and Steve both overtook me.

Despite some desperate trading (hence the title, since brown casinos became pretty desirable late in the game), and a fair bit of luck on gambling, I couldn't close the gap on Lucky Joe or Steve and his glittering Golden Palace right on the strip which was bound to pay out, and it did. Joe spent too much money trying to gain control of any casinos he didn't already have, and when that didn't work and the game ended in the next round, it left Steve in a fine position to win on a tie-breaker since he had the most money.

Steve 44
Joe 44
Andrew 26

The results for Tinners' Trail:

Sam 154
Anja 113
Jonny 107

And they had a short spell on TransAmerica while we finished off Lords of Vegas

Sam 1
Anja 3
Jonny 12

						Points
Sam	1	1	2	2	1	7
Joe	2	1	1	3	1	8
Adam	3	4	2	3	1	13
Steve	1	1	2	5	5	14
Andrew	3	2	4	3	4	16
Anja	2	2	4	4	5	17
Jonny	3	3	4	3	5	18
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20

Loyang Hair!

2012-01-12T22:55:00.001Z

Sam and I decided to tackle one of Sam's "Guilty Eleven", i.e. those eleven games he's bought but not yet played. Tonight it was At The Gates of Loyang, a sort of trading game that apparently plays best with two. When I arrived, the kids were out of the way and the table was already set up to begin. If I'd been any later, I expect Sam would've been standing at the window, waiting for me to arrive.

We read through the rules of the game, which are very badly written. So we watched a video on YouTube to see if we'd got it right, but even then, we didn't realise a couple of mistakes until quite late in the game.

Nevertheless, we understood the majority of the rules and, once we got into it, we found it to be quite an enjoyable game. First, you sow the seed. Then, nature grows the seed. Then you sell it to customers, or trade it on the market. There are certain cards which help with trading or harvesting etc.

There's not much interaction, but a certain amount of mistrust when your opponent has a card that allows him to sell to your customers. Also, there's a bit of bluffing in the card phase: you need to play two cards, but you have to pick up a card that's already face up on the table as well as a card from your hand. I found myself making "ooh, I don't want this card" type noises when laying a card down for all to see, only to pick it up again when I got the chance.

And the scoring system is clever too. Unfortunately, not easy to explain in a pithy sentence, and we misunderstood it until near the end of the game. However, for what it's worth, the game ended

Sam 15
Andrew 13

And the explanation for the title of this blog post? A recent craze amongst Sam's kids is to say "hair" preceded by a random word, such that great hilarity ensues. For example, "Egg hair", "Tooter hair" and the perennial favourite "Poo hair."

Night of the Ra-ing Dead

2012-01-10T22:32:00.008Z

The first Tuesday post-stabcon and Adam, Andrew, Joe and myself (Sam) welcomed Jonny back into the fold after an extended break. Steve, possibly feeling the effects of the weekend, was absent.

With all five players either indecisive or excessively polite, there was some discussion before the first game was chosen, which turned out to be Mammut, Joe's purchase from the aforementioned game-nirvana. It had been played over the weekend, but was new to me, and Jonny as well. However Joe's powers of explanation remain undiminished by heavy use, and soon we were arguing over the spoils of a day's hunting like proper cavemen - the first of two games themed on long-dead peoples. For some reason the neanderthal grunting this game encourages seems not to wear thin - at least, not to five guffawing morons. *

Anyway, though the game is relatively simple to learn the computation involved is too heavy for my puny brain, so I was quite surprised to finish second, and even more so to witness Adam finishing joint-last. What devious mind dreamed this bewilderment up?

Joe 42
Sam 40
Jonny 39
Adam/Andrew 35

We moved on to the evening's second game, which after a mercifully brief conflab turned out to be Ra, Reiner Knizia's classic of interpreting classical Eygyptian politics into a crazed game of bidding and nervously hedging one's bets. At the end of round two I felt I had a chance of first place, but a glance over at Joe's enormous collection of monuments told me the fight would be for second.

Which I just managed - tying with Andrew, who had managed to specialise in Nile tiles to the extent he scored 11pts for them in rounds 2 and 3 - as Joe 'the knowledge' Berger tied up a second win on the night, and Adam narrowly beat Jonny into third place:

Joe 43
Sam/Andrew 40
Adam 19
Jonny 17

It was half-ten by now so we decided to call it a night, our gaming thirst sufficiently sated.

*actually I believe Jonny is exempt from this, having not grunted and only laughed politely

						Points
Joe	1	1	3	1	3	9
Sam	2	2	1	2	2	9
Adam	3	4	2	3	1	13
Steve	1	2	5	5	5	18
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Andrew	2	4	3	4	6	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20
Jonny	4	3	5	5	5	22
Anja	4	4	5	5	5	23

Five go mad in Stockport

2012-01-08T22:21:00.019Z

Friday
Imagine unfolding a board game, and it doesn't stop. It covers the whole table, then the floor, then finally a whole conference hall of a medium sized hotel! This would not be dissimilar to Stabcon. Games which usually sit in a cupboard only to be allowed occasional visits to the kitchen table are suddenly given free reign to run around and do what they like. Now the players are not sat at the edge but are suddenly surrounded.

This environment seemed to affect some of the attendees. At Stabcon they were no longer geeks on the margins of society but were now in their element – they had status, walking around with all the confidence of a meeple who knows exactly what his next move will be. Some of them also dressed with confidence, albeit misplaced, with a wide selection of figure-hugging t-shirts, low-slung jeans and hats that were a couple of sizes too small for the wearer's head.

It was Steve's first Stabcon and as we pulled into the hotel car park, his first impressions can't have been good as the first identifiable gamer we saw was a guy with long greying hair and beard. Meanwhile, after only thirty seconds in the Stabcon hall, I heard someone cry out "Panic not!" and I wondered if it was going to be even geekier than last year. We signed in at the hotel, registered at Stabcon and grabbed a table.

Our first game was Wallenstein, a strategy game which involves moving coloured cubes around a map and in times of warfare, pouring the conflicting armies of small coloured cubes into a tower, hoping that yours will come out of the bottom while your enemy's cubes get stuck. It's a nice mechanic, and kind of random but not bad random, like dice. Plus, if you lost one battle, you could console yourself that your stuck cubes may be dislodged by your next battle, giving you an advantage.

We played quite happily, with a little help from a passing gamer who watched for a while and pointed out whenever we got a rule wrong. Joe also tried to count the number of women present since his wife was curious as to how many women turned up to these things. But on his first attempt, someone asked him what he was counting and he was too embarrassed to finish, and then on his second go he gave up saying "It's too difficult to tell!"

After Wallenstein (all results on the image at the end of the day's report), Joe suggested High Society. Reiner Knizia's cunning twist on bidding games. In this each player bids for cards numbered 1-10 or for a card that'll double your score. They also bid to not pick up bad cards such as –5, lose a card, or halve your score. The twist is that the person who has the least money remaining automatically loses, so there's no point in throwing your cash around like Mr Moneybags. It got a good response from me, but Steve admitted to not being sure what was going on. This was to become a recurring theme of the weekend.

We went to a nearby carvery for our dinner, just as we had done last year. They didn't remember us, though. Steve had the vegetarian option – a Wensleydale Bake which turned out to be mostly onions under it's thick layer of cheese.

rapt attendees

When we got back, we split up for a bit. Joe and Sam played another new game: Mr Jack. A cleverly devised game where one player has to guess which of the eight characters is Jack The Ripper, while the other player has to help Jack escape or evade detection. At the end of every round the detecting player asks if Jack is in the light or in the dark (ie, if he is next to a street light or next to another character then he is in the light) and thus the culprit is slowly revealed. There are eight rounds for Jack to escape/be caught. This is a very nice game and for once a proper detective board game. Although it's only for two players.

They then played Inka, which Joe wasn't too keen on, since there were simply too many variables to keep track of. Sam won this tile-sliding/rotating game too.

Meanwhile, me, Steve and Adam played Ascending Empires for some flicking fun. This Subbuteo in space got a few comments from people passing by who were interested in the game (and perhaps curious as to why Steve and Adam had large piles of victory points in front of them, whereas I seemed to have none). I was behind almost from the first flick, as Adam and Steve built up on techs. Eventually, I picked up three victory points after an exciting space battle with Steve. A battle which, according to Steve, cost him the game. Oopsie.

Then Area 51 regular Big Mike arrived asking if he could join a game. Joe and Sam were in the shop, and Adam, Steve and I were unsure what their plans were, but we agreed to a quick game of Tsuro. Easy to explain and fun to play and quick to finish – it was the perfect option. After we finished Big Mike seemed amazed that I was writing down the scores for future reference. "Live for the moment!" he exclaimed, which in any context other than a board games convention may have been life-affirming and exciting. As it was, he said it just before suggesting a game of Notre Dame.

After that there was a quick reshuffling of competitors. We chose Tinners' Trail but Big Mike was put off by the idea of a Martin Wallace game, so he went to teach Joe and Steve Priests of Ra.

Meanwhile, Sam, Adam and myself were joined by Simon (another Area 51 gamer) for his first ever tin-mining based game. He picked up the rules fairly quickly, and he kept up a commentary on his thought processes, perhaps hoping for us to jump in and offer a better option. Which we did... sometimes. Our game ended just before Joe and Steve's Priests of Ra, which they did not seem keen on. In fact, they walked out of the hall with all the relief of a half-drowned man crawling onto a river bank.

By now it was nearing one o'clock in the morning and so we ended our first day.

Saturday

Saturday is the day when most people attend Stabcon, and by the afternoon, every table was taken. At one point we left our table clear at lunch and lost it to another band of gamers. This relegated us to the wobbly table at the side. Nearest the bar, though, so not all bad.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the morning, after breakfast, we chose another new game, the eternally mispronounced La Cittá. I never really pressed people on the proper way to say it (Chi-TA, rhymes with pitta) and I'm glad I didn't because I doubt I'll ever hear it mentioned again. This game did not go down well, although we knew we weren't playing it in optimal circumstances: Five players, none of who had played it before.

This meant there was a lot of thinking in silence, and Adam quietly played Angry Birds on his phone between his goes. After a little under three hours, we decided to stop the game after the fourth round. Obviously the slow pace and unfamiliar rules can't have helped. I felt I had a fairly good grasp of it before too long, and perhaps as a three-player it'd be more interesting. Sam didn't seem keen on hanging onto it, so perhaps we'll never know. His quote, as we put it away, was a plaintive "Oh God, it's hideous!"

La Chitta (translation: 'the shitter')

After our lunch of sandwiches, Joe played Last Will with some other gamers, Sam and I played Mr Jack while Adam and Steve decided to tackle Twilight Struggle. I thoroughly enjoyed Mr Jack and I think it may be my favourite game of the weekend – short and simple, but very cunning. I lost both times, though.

Considering that Steve had already struggled with the rules of several games so far, I thought his choice to try and recreate the entire latter half of the twentieth century was a bold one. Especially against arch-tactician Adam. At one point I heard him ask Steve "Are you sure you don't want to invade Pakistan?" and I felt very grateful that he never joined the army or went into politics.

Despite Adam's warmongering, the game played out almost in real time and was abandoned after three hours, with no sign of Glasnost happening any time soon.

Meanwhile Sam and I chose a game of Alhambra. Perhaps he wanted to avenge his recent collapse in form. Dirk, once again, joined us and, once again, made the early running. But this time, Sam played a solid game, running out a clear winner.

Joe came back from his game of Last Will, declaring his affection for the game and the silliness of its theme. We played Ticket to Ride Switzerland – a map especially for three players. I really enjoyed this. It puts more emphasis on picking up more routes (which I did three times) which gives it an aspect of gambling, and the wild cards are only useful for tunnels. Of which there are a lot. Despite being the same game, TtR Switzerland has quite a different feel to the regular version. Meanwhile, Adam had got caught up in a short game with some other people, which he won.

Frequently during the weekend, between games, I'd wander around to see what other games where being played. I'd pause at each table to take in a little of the atmosphere and see if it looked interesting. At one table, I saw people sitting around a table without a board between them, and I wondered what game they were playing. It took me all of five seconds to work out that they were just chatting.

The five of us reconvened for a game of Joe's new game Mammut. Sam sat it out, happy to just watch. This game is a cleverly devised game of acceptable greed. Each game begins with a collection of Stone Age goodies (food, fire, animals, furs) from which each player may take as much as they like. But if they take too much, the next player is allowed to take their stash, returning one item to the centre. So each player needs to judge what is advantageous, but still doesn't look so great that someone else will take it. Added to this part of the game is a scoring system that confused Steve a bit, but we played on quite happily.

After our second visit to the carvery for dinner, we set up a game of Navegador on our wobbly table. Area 51 stalwart, Cuz walked past and said "I love this game. It's totally busted", meaning there's a sure-fire way to win the game. Since it was new to all five of us, it was slow going at first and Cuz's words hung heavily over the table. But as we got the hang of it, we started to enjoy it. I was black, and I was keen to recreate the historical arrival of the Black Ships from Portugal and their arrival in Nagasaki. But Steve beat me to it, and he was blue. Whoever heard of the Blue Ships from Portugal?!

By now, it was getting late. We played two games of High Society and then Sam and I called it a day at around half past eleven. But Joe, Steve and Adam weren't so easily satisfied. They hung on for one more game of Mammut.

Sunday

attendees playing Roads and Boats — a sunday Stabcon stalwart

Me, Adam and Joe were the early risers and, after breakfast, we got ourselves a decent table. Steve arrived before long, and we discussed what to play while waiting for Sam. In the end we decided on Reiner Knizia's Decathlon because it's easy to learn and you can just stop when you want.

This game – a ten-event collection of dice games loosely themed on the events of a decathalon – was certainly easy to learn. Adam didn't like the lack of strategy, but it was certainly popular with other gamers. It was the only time in the whole weekend that we had spectators watching, Up to five people at one point.

Adam considered joining in with a game of Eclipse that was just setting up, and asked if any of us were interested. Eclipse was the top game of the convention, with as many as six games going on at the same time. It looked like an over-complicated monstrosity to me and the wide variety of plastic bits on the table didn't inspire confidence. Steve said he may try it next year if people are still playing it after all the hype had died down.

the ubiquitous Eclipse

Sam arrived, and we gave Navegador another try. As we played, I felt my gaming legs giving way. I was disadvantaged early and seemed unable to do anything about it. Two new tactics came into play, as Sam kept his boats near colonies allowing him to quickly claim them if anyone came close, while Adam sat on the advantageous Navegador card until it really helped him a lot.

Steve had trouble telling the difference between selling and processing goods, and I always wanted to do the action that I had just gone past. At the end, I thought Adam was the clear winner, but that turned out to be wrong! Sam won, with Joe in second. Then, as we were packing away, Joe realised he'd put a vital multiplier token on the wrong part of his playing board, costing him four points and first place!

Finally, we started to pack away and take things to the car, but there was time for two last games of Tsuro with a passing gamer from Sheffield. This was her first Stabcon but not her first gaming meeting, and we learnt that it wasn't very well publicised compared to the other board game conventions. After hearing this we wondered if we'd somehow stumbled upon a hardcore clique of gamers. And, if so, is it bad that we felt quite at home?

Sam and Joe finally got to chat with board game designer Martin Wallace, which must've been nice for them. As we drove away from Stockport, Joe surprised me by asking us if we thought Stabcon could last another day? I don't know about Stabcon, but I don't think I could have.

The final leaderboard puts Adam at the top of the pile for this year's visit to Stabcon! Congratulations.

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Adam	8	7	2
Sam	8	3	4
Andrew	3	8	3
Joe	2	4	7
Steve	1	4	4

January tales.

2012-01-04T12:50:00.003Z

In an astonishing feat of restraint I had managed to avoid buying any new games over the Christmas period, telling myself that come January I would pick up some bargains. Unlike the Bristol brigade, who seem to be able to introduce a new flavour every week (It only seems that way), tonights fare was served up favourites from last years table and not a turkey in sight. After I managed to tear Paul away from my two rather playful new kittens, he graciously or unwisely offered me first choice of game.

Totally disregarding Paul's open dislike for card based games I unboxed Dominion (Intrigue) to see if his mind could be changed. I chose a party time style set of decks to see if the freer play would help Paul enjoy the game. Dominion is one of those games for us that always needs a rules refresher. Even so some of the cards had us a little confused due the use of the word "Gain" and early progress was slow. Suddenly it all clicked and we were racing through our decks with a barely a pause. (Save for Boris shinning up my leg, clambering onto my laptop and onto the table for a good nose round).

In the games dissection afterwards we noticed that Paul and I had selected differing strategies, with him only using a Bridge, Pawn, Upgrade combination where as I tried a bit of everything but stuck mainly to Great halls and Nobles with a few pawns thrown in for good measure.

Somewhat surprisingly the game ended a dead heat, 58 points each. Checking the rules the only other differentiator was the amount of turns, which was equal. Therefore, the rules declared, we should rejoice in our shared victory. So we rejoiced.

Next up Paul's choice Ticket to Ride. I tried the accepted card hoarding method and really long route, whereas Paul set about adding fistfuls of tickets and creating a sort of explosion effect in the middle of the map. Paul's bravado paid off even it nearly backfired on him. His superior haul of tickets beat my massive chain which nearly reached from the west coast to the east and back again.

Paul - 109
Chris - 94

There was just time to fit in a game of Aton. The game was actually closer than the final scores reveal, but my last hand of 4,4,3,3 was too powerful for Paul to defend.

Chris - 49
Paul - 29

Honours even for the night then and so we rejoiced again. On the journey to the train station I promised Paul some new games for the New Year. It's a tricky thing getting well balanced two player games so any suggestions are welcome.....

New year, new start

2012-01-03T23:43:00.004Z

Tonight was the grand opening and it saw an attendance of eight sat around Sam’s extending kitchen table. Current man-of-the-moment Quentin returned, and Hannah, Steve and Anja also swelled the ranks.

Before Steve and Anja arrived in their car (which was, apparently, on a meter which made me think it would suddenly cut out after a set time) the six of us managed to squeeze in a game of Tsuro. This sedate version of Tron’s Light-Cycles game was pretty tense, but soon saw my early demise at the hands of – who else – Quentin. Hannah couldn’t get out of a corner, so span off in fifth and then Joe took out Quentin in a crazed suicide pact, leaving Sam and Adam on the board. Unfortunately, Sam’s lone tile took him straight off the board allowing Adam a comfortable win.

1. Adam
2. Sam
3= Joe
3= Quentin
5. Hannah
6. Andrew

When Steve and Anja arrived, the group split into two groups of four. Quentin, Hannah, Anja and Steve played Batavia: a jolly game of trading with the exciting new market of the Indian sub-continent. Hopefully one of them can fill us in with the details later.

Joe, Adam, Sam and I played Chinatown. In this game, each player has to build up businesses which then bring in money. This game is reliant on negotiation and I’m simply too laid back to haggle. My first transaction with Sam brought forth insults and derision from Joe and Adam who insisted we do it again with a proper price this time.

Before long we started to get more into the swing of things. Sam built up some nice businesses early on, so Adam’s tactic seemed to be bleed Sam for whatever he could get. Joe was Mr Quiet, building his empires unnoticed. Although we thought he was in the lead, even we were surprised by the bonus he reaped in the last round with his newly completed businesses. I just muddled along, man. It’s only money, after all.

Joe $1,210,000
Sam $1,060,000
Adam $990,000
Andrew $650,000

The game on the other half on the table ended at almost the same time, with Quentin continuing his good run of form.

Quentin 62
Steve 39
Hannah 30
Anja 22

Quentin decided he had to dash, and so he bade is farewells. The seven of us split again into groups of three and four. Steve, Hannah and Joe played TransAmerica while Sam, Anja, Adam and myself chose Poison. The two games played out in near silence as the tension rose. In our game of Poison it was a close run thing from the start. However, in TransAmerica Steve ended the first round very early. Joe pointed out to our colour-blind comrade that he hadn’t picked up an orange card, and so one was quickly given to him from the remaining cards. Steve wasn’t down-hearted for long since he then linked to this last station with his next go, sending Joe and Hannah hurtling up the score-track towards the train shed of doom. After that, it was just a case of hanging on for grim life for Hannah and Joe as Steve ran out a comfortable winner in three rounds.

Steve 1
Hannah 13
Joe 15

In our game of Poison, Adam started badly but cleared the last round with no points at all. It wasn’t enough to close the gap on Sam, though.

Sam 13
Adam 14
Andrew 17
Anja 23

I wasn't going to add a leaderboard so soon, but since we managed to squeeze so much into one evening, I may as well...

						Points
Sam	1	2	2	5	5	15
Adam	2	3	1	5	5	16
Joe	3	1	3	5	5	17
Steve	1	2	5	5	5	18
Quentin	1	3	5	5	5	19
Hannah	2	3	5	5	5	20
Anja	4	4	5	5	5	23
Andrew	3	4	6	5	5	23

Inka

2011-12-29T23:45:00.001Z

29th December. What a boring day. Neither Christmas nor New Year, what are we to make of it? Shops make a half-hearted attempt at opening, and most coffee shops can’t be bothered. Samoa is about to change its time zone, meaning they hop over the international date line. Which date did they chose to skip over?

December 30th.

You see: December 29th is so boring that they didn’t even consider it.

But into this blustery, slightly rainy evening I went to Sam’s for a little light gaming. We tried Inka – a new game whose four-page rule book didn’t seem too daunting. In this, each player has to get to the centre of the board, collect three treasures, and then get to an exit. They do this by rotating or sliding trapezoidal floor pieces and by hopping nimbly over snakes.

I point slightly to the left of Sam's blocking counter for illustrative purposes

It’s a puzzle game where you can foil your opponent by blocking a tile, meaning it can’t be moved. There’s a lot of Analysis Paralysis, and I found it fairly frustrating. The rules are simple, but still not properly explained. It’s not clear when a piece can rotate, nor what the effect the blocking piece has. Sam enjoyed it, though. Mind you, he won both times. It might be more interesting with more than two players. It'll probably be a lot longer, too.

Then Sam suggested a quick game of Alhambra. Since it was a two-player affair, the imaginary player Dirk joined in and quickly proved himself to be an adept opponent. We had barely got started when the first scoring card was revealed. This gave Dirk, with his six tiles, a commanding lead since he won most categories. As the game progressed, I found the cards and tiles synchronised perfectly while Sam grimly watched one opportunity after another going begging. Dirk, meanwhile, remained in the lead with me in close contention.

As we approached the final scoring round, Sam managed to get a few more tiles on the board, but he was finding it frustrating and the five buildings in his reserve can’t have offered much comfort. I was having quite the opposite experience and was able to overhaul Dirk in the final reckoning. My score was 140 (just one off the high score) to Dirk’s 123 and Sam’s 61.

Finally we rounded of the evening with a game of Tsuro. I enjoy this game when it’s two-player, and we ducked and feinted around the board, playing cautiously, until my tiles forced me into a straight duel with Sam, which I promptly lost. Oh well.

The Season's End

2011-12-21T00:07:00.047Z

The final games night of the season arrived with mulled wine, mince pies and a selection of pizzas. Sadly, Joe wasn’t in attendance, but the numbers were swelled to eight Steve, Anja and Hannah, as well as two wise men from the East (cut-backs, you see: couldn’t afford the third) Paul and Chris.

We split into two groups of four. My half (me, Sam, Adam, Anja) decided on Stone Age since Anja hadn’t played it before. The other half of the table (Steve, Hannah, Chris, Paul) decided on Sam’s still-in-its-wrapper Ascending Empires. This involved a lot of stickers being stuck, and a certain amount of searching under tables as pieces were knocked onto the floor with alarming regularity. I commend Sam’s calmness, since he didn’t suddenly yell “What are you doing to my beautiful new game!!” at any point during this farrago. Which is what I would have done. Hopefully someone from that end of the table can update this post or add a comment describing their adventures in Fingernail-Powered Space Exploration.

On my end of the table, Adam was talking Anja through the rules of Stone Age. She took most of it in, but seemed a little worried when she learnt that this was the most-played game of recent games nights. And perhaps it was a little unfair of her to compete against Adam and Sam who’d both proven their worth on as hunter-gatherers many times in the past. Especially as certain rules were still being explained to her as the game went on.

Four player Stone Age is a very different beast to the versions with fewer players. I spent most of the game thinking I hadn’t really made any progress and looking nervously at Sam’s pile of cards. Anja made the newbie mistake of trying to get a bit of everything, although she was the axe queen by the end of the game. Meanwhile, Adam kept forgetting he needed food and Sam kept insisting his cards weren’t that good.

When it came to adding up the scores, Sam did well on the civilazation cards, but missed out on the multipliers. I got some useful field multipliers and was boosted by my usual reliance on huts. Anja couldn’t turn her axe monolpoly into many points, and so ended in fourth, but hats off to Adam who showed a bit of his old flair with a multiplier that got him forty points, sending him to an easy win.

Adam 147
Andrew 117
Sam 112
Anja 89

After we finished, we watched the closing stages of Ascending Empires. It was clearly between Paul and Hannah, with their two piles of victory points sitting in front of them. Soon the game came to a close, and points were totted. Hannah ran out a much more comfortable winner than you may have thought at first glance, which made Paul consider the chilling thought that next time he’d start on warfare even earlier.

Hannah 40
Paul 23
Steve 22
Chris 19

So it’s the end of the season. As season that, in many ways, belonged to one man. Quentin. His visits to the table were few, but comprehensive enough that he takes most categories in the old style leader board. In the new Form Table, Sam takes top spot, as he does in the Leader Board. But Quentin shows how he is Mr Consistency with firsts in Points ratio, Absolute points ratio and Weighted points ratio. Five wins out of six is not a record to be scoffed at, and it also put him third in the Olympic-style leader board.

Other performances of note: Hannah, in her one appearance, scored the most overwhelming victory, stastically speaking, scoring almost twice as much as her nearest rival. Steve took highest points ratio according to the length of the game: he only played three times, but each time the game went on for ages. We at GNN salute that kind of stamina. The leader board will now be put in cryogenic suspension until the New Year. In the meantime, Happy Christmas!!

						Points
Sam	3	2	1	2	1	9
Quentin	1	1	1	2	1	9*
Joe	1	2	1	4	4	12
Adam	1	3	2	4	3	13
Andrew	2	4	3	3	2	14
Steve	3	3	2	5	5	18
Dan	3	1	5	5	5	19
Jonny	3	2	4	5	5	19
Hannah	1	5	5	5	5	21
Andy	2	4	5	5	5	21
Paul	2	5	5	5	5	22
Sally	2	5	5	5	5	22
Anja	4	5	5	5	5	24
Chris	4	5	5	5	5	24

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio	Absolute	Abs ratio	Weight	Wt. ratio	Length	Lth. ratio
Sam	28	125	4.46	1500	53.57	91.5	4.16	95.84	3.42
Adam	26	113.5	4.37	1423	54.73	82	3.9	96.68	3.72
Andrew	29	106.5	3.67	1346	46.41	75.5	3.15	85.85	2.96
Joe	19	72	3.79	1003	52.79	84	4.94	70	3.35
Quentin	6	31	5.17	367	61.17	32	5.33	23	3.83
Steve	3	11	3.67	156	52	9	3	18.75	6.25
Jonny	3	10.5	3.5	284	40.57	25	5	9.8	3.13
Dan	2	8	4	21	10.5	5	N/A	6.5	3.25
Andy	2	7	3.5	68	34	3	N/A	4	2
Hannah	1	5.5	N/A	40	N/A	5.5	N/A	8.25	N/A
Paul	1	4.5	N/A	23	N/A	4.5	N/A	6.75	N/A
Sally	1	4.5	N/A	26	N/A	4.5	N/A	1.49	N/A
Anja	1	2.5	N/A	89	N/A	2.5	N/A	2.5	N/A
Chris	1	2.5	N/A	19	N/A	3.5	N/A	3.75	N/A

The Olympic leaderboard...

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Sam	11	9	7
Adam	10	7	5
Quentin	5	1	0
Joe	3	6	5
Andrew	2	9	14
Dan	1	0	1
Hannah	1	0	0
Steve	0	1	2
Jonny	0	1	1
Andy	0	1	0
Paul	0	1	0
Sally	0	1	0

Note re scoring methods: Absolute points/ratio refers to the number of points scored in a game. This is obviously a very silly criteria, since your success depends on how generous the game is with giving out points. Weighted points: this is your points adjusted to how well you did last season, so people who did well are penalised and those who did badly get a boost. Weighted for length: your points are multiplied according to how long the game goes on for.

Lights! Canada! Action!

2011-12-16T00:30:00.003Z

This morning a newly house-proud Joe sent out an email for gamers to gather at his kitchen where a brand new adjustable light-fitting hung above the table. He wanted to see how it performed in a board game setting, hence the invitation. As I’m the only one not busy/ill/asleep on a Thursday, I was the only one who could make it.

But it gave me the chance to try one of these two-player games that I’ve read about but never been able to play. I wanted to try A Few Acres Of Snow, so Joe talked me through the rules. It’s basically a card-management game along the lines of Dominion or Thunderstone but with far more options available and a map of the north east of America from a weird angle. I was the British and Joe was the French in our set up and we set about rewriting history at around 8.20pm.

I started in a feisty mood, settling in Halifax, which changed hands several times during the game. As did Pemaquid: Both very desirable locations. Less desirable, but still fought over was Kennebec. A wide open space which helps you do nothing. Nevertheless, raiding/settling there did get rid of unwanted cards. I looked up Kennebec on Wikipedia and it’s just a river.

No victory points here. Move along, folks...

Joe expanded his empire south towards Detroit which scored points, but cluttered his hand with a lot of unwanted location cards. I kept trying to lay siege whenever I could, and by the end I had amassed a tidy pile of Joe’s cubes. I think my favourite bit was the option to keep cards in reserve, which you could then pay to use in an emergency (ie, battle). Those cards at first act as a deterrent to any warfare, but if you keep an eye on your opponent’s money then you can attack when he can’t afford to use them so they’re no longer a threat – in fact they’re as good as out of the game. Until he can get more money.

Finally, Joe ended the game by using the last of his settlement cubes and the points were totted up.

Joe 56
Andrew 49

An enjoyable game once it gets going, and isn’t so heavy that the two hours seem like a slog. I had a lot of fun and a lovely mince pie.

Adit, Caesar!

2011-12-12T12:14:00.008Z

Sam was hosting tonight, and sounded the all-clear at just gone 7.15pm. I immediately hopped in the car, and got there first. In no time at all we were joined by Adam and Andrew.
We hemmed and hawed over what to play — thinking we would be five for the first time in ages, I'd brought Santiago and Cuba (not to be confused with Santiago De Cuba), but after a peek in Sam's fine games cupboard, Taj Mahal and TransAmerica were added to the mix. At this point, Steve texted to say he wouldn't be joining us, and so we were down once more to the core four; Adam suggested we kick off with a bit of Ave Caesar.

We played three races, everyone but Adam winning one, so we ended with a three way tie for first with 12 points each, Adam lagging fourth with 9.
A disturbing pattern had begun to emerge, with the starting player in each race winning.

So what next? I suggested Tinners' Trail, which is perfect for four players, and a real GNN favourite. I'm surprised there isn't more love for TT on the Geek, it's a fantastic game. Just enough economics to be interesting without being overwhelming, lots of interesting, tense decisions, and some very clever mechanics like the diminishing returns on the investment track, and the elegant turn-order mechanism. Add to that lots of lovely wooden bits and a playing time of about an hour. And it is one of the best value games out there too; you can pick it up online for £25. What's to not to not not like?

Well, there is a fair amount of that, I guess.

I hadn't played in a while, and it took me a while to get back in to the swing of it — I bid £12 for a mine as my first action of the game, which left me struggling to scrape together enough money to mine it. But it was worth the effort, because the copper price in round one was a whopping £10, giving Sam and I the chance to make some bold investments. Adam made a single £15 one, and Andrew eschewed investing at all in the first round.
From then on, it was the usual battle of steam pumps vs adits, ships vs trains, and Cornish pasties vs fourth place on the turn-order track. Round two saw Adam mine vast quantities of tin and copper from a dry mine, and it looked as though Sam and I had some serious competition. But he'd missed the big bucks on copper, which never regained the dizzying heights of the early game, and tin, true to form, remained a relatively stable but lowly £5 for the rest of the game. Andrew made the big money in round three, but decided to keep much of it rather than investing.

Sam, quietly contemplating — pasties, mining? Mining then pasties, then more mining!

Sam had made a bold move in round one, augmenting a mine he didn't even own with miners and steam ships. And then promptly buying it! He paid for it, but it was a very canny trick.
If I had a strategy, it was to not bother looking too closely at what the others were doing. I like games like that, it's hard enough trying to work out what I need to do, without factoring in three other trains-of-thought. But as Andrew pointed out, once the mines are bought, you can't sabotage them, so you might as well get on with what you want to do.

Round four — everybody please stand.

In the end, I pipped Sam to the win by a mere four points — it's only now that I realise how lucky I was. The investments come in £5 increments. so making sure you have no loose change at the end is important. By chance rather than planning, I ended up with £55; had I had £54, I would only have been able to invest £50, and Sam would have won (that may not be true actually, because pounds are only equivalent to points in round one . . . still.)

The final scores were:
Joe 108
Sam 104
Adam 100
Andrew 70

Andrew gives himself that 'disappointed' look he hates.

So we finished the night with a final game of Ave Caesar, to break the three-way tie for first place.
The disturbing trend we'd noticed earlier continued, with Adam starting first and finishing first.
At least we all got a go doing that. The final scores were:

Sam 16
Adam and Joe 15
Andrew 14

Not a good final game for Andrew, who went from joint winner to fourth place in that last race, compounding his fourth place in Tinners' Trail. But a lovely evening all round — thanks Sam. JB

[Ersby here, reporting from Leaderboard Central]

My poor showing sees me drop like a dead cow from a helicopter from second down to fifth. Meanwhile, the new rule (called Sam’s Law of Increasing Points, or "SLIP") comes into play. It’s still experimental, but I suggest that once a player has completed six games, his or her (okay, let’s be honest: his) points will go up by one for every week they don’t attend, as shown by an asterisk. It may be only one point per week, but it does stop people “parking the bus” at the top of the table. However, if they return for another evening, these fictional points are wiped from the slate and their points return to normal.

						Points
Sam	2	1	2	1	3	9
Quentin	1	1	1	2	1	9*
Joe	1	2	1	4	4	12
Adam	3	2	4	3	1	13
Andrew	4	3	3	2	2	14
Jonny	3	2	4	5	5	19
Dan	3	1	5	5	5	19
Steve	3	2	5	5	5	20
Andy	2	4	5	5	5	21
Sally	2	5	5	5	5	22

The Poison Palace

2011-12-11T19:22:00.006Z

On Saturday night we had friends over for games, and I was feeling nervous. These friends - Mark and Katie - are gamers, but gamers in the sense of splashing about in the sunny, healthy shallows, while we lunatics are 100m down in the depths, comparing mechanics, writing blogs, dreaming of meeples etc. Only the other night we had a 5 minute conversation about Stabcon without actually mentioning it by name.

So the reason for my nervousness was that I had dangled, carrot-like, several gaming options to lure them away from the comparative safety of classics like Carcassone, Ticket to Ride or Trans-America. But having done so I'd had a fit of panic when they chose Poison and, specifically, Tinner's Trail.

"Tinner's Trail?" Joe's face fell. "Are you sure?!" - one of Joe's many large steps toward social pariah-dom was taken when he attempted to inflict this game on his family and friends. "It was a disaster" he related grimly. I was thrown. A disaster? Really? Auctions, time-tracks, copper, tin, water, adits, historical themes, a slightly complicated scoring system involving investments that recoup less over time... what's not to like?

Well, I supposed compared to say, Settlers, it might seem a little complex. I borrowed Alhambra from Joe as my Plan B. As it turned out, Mark seemed to take Plan B as an affront on his gaming prowess, and was determined to play Tinner's Trail, but after a curry and chips, several glasses of wine and three rounds of Poison it was simply too late to crack open anything Martin Wallace might have thought of, so Alhambra it was.

Poison scores first: We played each round as an individual game and I think I won the first two. Mark definitely won the last one with a big fat zero. I'd managed to Jefferies-curse Katie by suggesting via email she'd be good at this, so naturally she came off worst in every game.

But in Alhambra the Carcassone-Chiseller of old was cracking her knuckles (except for the one dodgy finger) and going for a healthy spread of second-and-first places in medium buildings plus a fancy wall to pull off a debut win:

Katie 110

Sam 103

Mark 95

Sally 93

Mark, who had been lagging behind after the first two scoring rounds, snuck past Sally despite having the most erratic wall-builder in all of Spain, and hit me with both barrels on the Towers, nabbing the last two in one turn to sneak into first and deprive me of a possible win. Sally was the victim of fatigue; having led after round one and two, her game went to pot as she - well, all of us, to be fair - got too preoccupied over whose turn it was to concentrate on tactics.

Nevertheless, both games went down very well. Mark threatened to buy Poison for Katie (instead of knickers) and Katie said she was tempted to come to Stabcon. Mainly to see how weird it is, it must be said, but in this church we'll take our members by stealth if we have to.

So no Tinner's Trail this time, but was it a missed opportunity, or a near-miss? I guess the only way to find out... is to play it next time.

Torres Redux

2011-12-08T21:08:00.003Z

As ever, when Thursday arrives my early morning thoughts of hitting the sack 5 minutes after the kids do have dissipated by the time evening rolls around. The games cupboard calls my name, and like a sailor dashed on the rocks, lured by a siren's wail, I respond.

So does Andrew. I guess we're the ones with bugger all else to do.

So tonight we revisited Torres as a 2-player game, having discovered on Tuesday that one pertinent rule about knight placement had eluded us. We'd enjoyed it the first time; this time it was even better. We played the 'Master' version: Adam might like to know that this eliminates the chance element of Action Cards, as each player starts with their own set - and it also supplies you with the option of gaining a bonus from a 'Master' card drawn randomly at the start of the game - in this case the bonus available was 40 points if you had all your knights orthogonally adjacent at the third and final scoring round.

I started well, but just as with our first two-player game Andrew outscored me in round two, moving just a few points behind me on the score track. Come the third and final round I sacrificed scoring Andrew's castle to line up my knights and go for the bonus. But having made it I realised I would have scored more sticking with the castle and building upwards - Andrew picked up 54 points compared to my 40. I also lost out on the King's bonus, but did manage to put together 81 points for the biggest castle - 9 tiles high x 9 area. But it wasn't enough to win - Andrew's more nomadic knights brought home the scoring bacon in the tightest finish possible:

Andrew 268

Sam 267

We'd raced through Torres so fast it was a wonder any of the castles stayed upright, but having done so we had time for Citadels. Again I established an early lead; again Andrew's canny play won the day. I was nowhere contemplating the finish line when he suddenly - courtesy of the architect - built three buildings to end the game, and left my wayward assassin twiddling his butter-fingered thumbs:

Andrew 31

Sam 21

If Endersby can bring this form to Tuesday nights we may have a new aspirant to the ratio throne...

Digging up the Past.

2011-12-08T10:14:00.003Z

"I would like to play something with a board." Paul answered when asked what he would like to play for the final game. Previously in the evening we had steamed across America in Ticket to Ride, but it was another outing of Citadels which prompted Paul's plea. On the journey to Bracknell station Paul reflected that he doesn't really get on with games that don't have a board to put all your stuff on.

I surveyed my modest stack of games and caught Stone Age coyly winking at me. As much as I love the old flirt (SA, not Paul) I thought maybe tonight was it was time for a change. Tikal had been lurking around in my attic for several years, unplayed, until I noticed some months back that it had 2 players written on the side. This game, it must be said, was always well received and it's surprising it never received more plays.

In Tikal you adopt the role of a director on an expedition intent on uncovering Mayan sites located in the dense Jungle. You take turns to reveal tiles which may have any one of a blank space, a temple, an artefact haul or a Volcano! (Quite how you would miss seeing a bloody great volcano is beyond me). The latter tile sparks off (pun intended) a scoring round, of which there are four in the game. The tiles can be laid in any adjoining space that allows a path back to the start and are revealed in a semi random fashion.

Each player gets 10 action points to spend on ...err actions. They can be dig for treasure, develop a level of temple, add expedition members, create a new base camp and so on. The essence of the game is to get yourself in positions of power around the temples so that you may gain the points during the scoring round.

Unfortunately it wasn't until the second Volcano had come and gone that I realised we hadn't been doing the scoring rounds correctly. Crucially, both players are allowed 10 action points before they score however we just played whoever it was that got the tile. Me. Although I was slightly ahead Paul graciously turned down my offer of equalising the scores.

The game played out as I expected it would, like a a mad trolly dash to grab the abundant goodies with little to prevent you doing it. The 3 and 4 player game (Like so many of this type) have a limiting effect on resources. The rules did not have amendments for 2 players which I felt it needed. In the end I ran out the winner due to my well excavated temples!

Final scores on the night went as follows
TTR
Chris 127
Paul 106

Citadels
Chris 31
Paul 13

Tikal
Chris 172
Paul 153

On Monday I met up with James again and we managed to squeeze in 3 games, two Citadels and one Carcassonne : Discovery.

It was a whitewash and he won all Three.

Dang! A trip to the games shop in January I feel to expand the collection..

Of Castles and Saraglios

2011-12-07T00:07:00.006Z

Tonight once again saw the four core members of GNN arrive for their weekly board game fix. We did wonder if it was some personal hygiene problem that was keeping other people away. I thought perhaps the blog posts describing complex battles over intricate games was putting off the casual gamers, and maybe something lighter was needed to bring in the punters. So I was ready to suggest a game of tag and bobbing for apples this evening, but by the time I’d arrived Torres had been chosen as the evening’s opening game.

The rules for this kind-of-3D-draughts (where you build up the board yourself) were described by Sam, and we began. Before long Adam was asking chillingly pertinent questions and I was convinced that he had instantly acquired a deep understanding of the rules. He found himself in an early tussle with Sam, which had the advantage of them giving each other points as they built up their shared castles.

Joe, meanwhile, concentrated on the more affordable end of the castle market, with some dainty little castles that no one bothered to challenge him on. Instead, he got his points from the King’s Bonus (hur hur, he said "boners") which a knight would receive if the King stayed in his castle.

I played a middle road, mostly sneaking some points off Sam and Adam by joining in with their castles. But Sam played the board like a master. Or at least like someone who’d played before and paid attention. He got points from the big castles and for also receiving the King’s Bonus. Final impressions of the game were that Joe thought it was too abstract, and Adam thought it wasn’t abstract enough. We counted up the scores, with Joe’s dog adding sighs of approval/disappointment as we did. The final scores favoured those who’d played before, but only just:

Sam 204
Andrew 177
Adam 175
Joe 168

Next we chose Alhambra since it was still early. Although it’s not often that we begin a game of Alhambra when we’re already tipsy, and thus the game took longer than usual. Sam went for his usual tactic of a long, snaking wall. Adam had a very neat and symmetrical set of tiles, and I sort of bumbled through the game without really paying much attention. I did get lucky with a couple of tiles which helped me connect my wall and score me points, though, so that was nice.

Sam’s concentration was almost ruined by me referencing a Genesis song during one of our many witty exchanges. Since Joe and Adam were keen to hear more about this "worst song ever written", Adam found it on the internet and we had the displeasure of sitting through a live version while we played the game. (You can hear the album version here, but you may hate me afterwards if you do.)

The final scores were added up, and for once Sam’s long wall didn’t get him first place, but only by the slimmest of margins. It was Joe’s balanced play that won the evening. Meanwhile Adam cursed me and Sam for picking up the wrong kind of tiles in the last round, costing him dearly in points. Oh well.

Joe 101
Sam 100
Andrew 87
Adam 85

Not a great night for Adam in the controversial new leaderboard. Perhaps new rules will be brought in for the new year. In the meantime I think my position on the Form Table is as good as it’s going to get, unless I can return to winning ways. Adam drops to a very uncharacteristic fifth.

(JB butts in)
At the end of the evening, Sam and Andrew were so busy discussing the intricacies of the latest form table, they failed to notice Joe using his cardboard-mage skills.

The Form Table...

						Points
Quentin	1	1	1	2	1	6
Andrew	3	2	2	1	1	9
Sam	2	1	3	3	2	11
Joe	1	4	4	2	3	14
Adam	4	3	1	4	3	15
Jonny	3	2	4	5	5	19
Dan	3	1	5	5	5	19
Steve	3	2	5	5	5	20
Andy	2	4	5	5	5	21
Sally	2	5	5	5	5	22

What Frodo Did Next.

2011-12-02T09:52:00.013Z

Last night the call came to Bag End - it was time to set out on a long and dangerous journey; four brave hobbits would be needed to take the one ring to Mordor and chuck it in the volcano.

However we had to make do with two in the end as Merry and Pippin were apparently busy - IKEA in the latter's case. Perhaps Gandalf shouldn't have disguised the dire warning of evil dominions afoot as a 'game of Torres' - as that turned out to be spectacularly untrue.

Instead Andrew and I, still smarting from defeat to Sauron last week, took the little bastard on again. Andrew was Frodo and I was... Sam. If anyone hasn't played this, the game takes place over four boards, and during each one you have to negotiate your way nearer and nearer to Mordor, while the forces of darkness infiltrate the 'event' tiles and try and stop you. All the time Sauron is trying to drag the Hobbits toward the dark, and move himself to the light. Should the two moral opposites (represented by colourful Hobbit pieces and a one-eyed, kitten-esque Sauron) meet on the influence track, it's game over.

How this all works is through card-management, so it's kind of a fire-fighting game in the the vein of Year of the Dragon, except of course it's co-operative.

So how did we fare? Last week, we had managed to get ourselves to Mordor with nary a frayed nerve, but were left with a hollow feeling as a succession of event tiles at the start of the last board saw Sauron march to the final event, where he simply took the ring from us and laughed in our faces like a spoilt brat.

So this time, having taken a few hits stocking up on cards at Helm's Deep, we arrived at Sauron's house and decided the best bet was speed. We would expedite the destruction of the ring, post-haste! Ignoring the threat of Orcs, Gollum, and a sprained ankle, we hurried along the main track and within 5 minutes I was hurling the ring into Mount Doom. Hooray! Middle-Earth is saved.

Fuck you, Sauron.

But saved for what end? Just as with our previous defeat, the victory left us a little hollow. It's so abrupt; one moment you're trying to save the world, the next you're looking at the time and thinking should I have another beer, or would the sensible option be tea?

For me, this is LotR's downfall. During play it's quite fun, and the cooperative element feels novel - at least for our little group. Knizier manages to ramp up the pressure as the game progresses, but when it's over, it's - over. Like a shallow sexual experience for two people who don't really like each other, your relationship with the game feels not entirely worth the effort. It would be great if this final show-down had more oomph to it - it's own little board, perhaps, a game within a game, where suddenly there could be a competitive element between the Hobbits. Maybe I'll drop Reiner a line and suggest it.

So what did the hobbits do next? We played Trans-America, and Sam kicked Frodo's ass!

Vegas, Baby!

2011-11-29T23:47:00.009Z

Tonight, the four core GNN regulars arrived at Sam’s with Joe bringing along Lords of Vegas as the evening’s special treat as Joe desperately tries to get everyone to play his freshly-bought board games to convince himself he hasn't wasted his money. Before we began, he ruefully admitted that he wouldn’t buy any more games until Christmas. But he did have lots of board games on his new iPhone. At least if he puts them there, they won’t take up valuable shelf-space in the house.

Lords of Vegas is all about gaining control of areas which will then hopefully score points and earn money. It’s all about gambling, since a random selection of areas never get played at all, allowing neighbouring players to take them over for a fee. Of course, this then leaves them worrying that this area may be revealed later in the game, meaning they lose the property they spent so much money on building. It’s all about risk and reward, and playing the odds.

Since it was everyone’s first game, I threw caution to the wind and I bought up vacant lots whenever possible, hoping that the casino would pay out. And, to my delight, it often did. Joe, who’d played this game before, was behind in the early part of the game but finished strongly. Gamblin’ Sam had mixed luck with the dice while Cautious Adam had some luck, but never reaped the full rewards since he often shared any financial risk with the bank. Less in losses, but less in wins too.

It’s a very gamble-y game, with choices made according to what you think the most likely card will be next. I enjoyed it, and there’s a certain excitement when somebody decides to reorganise a casino, meaning everyone’s dice get rolled and a new boss is chosen. I think we underplayed the trading section, but I don't think the game suffered too much.

Andrew 36, wins tiebreaker on money
Joe 36
Sam 26, wins tiebreaker on money
Adam 26

After such opulent gaming, with properties being developed for millions of dollars, why not continue the high-rolling atmosphere with For Sale! In this card game we bid for properties in the same care-free manner as other people feed bread to ducks. I felt confident in this game, too, after a round of betting between Joe, Sam, and Adam over the highest valued property left them all relatively cash-poor.

In the second half of the game, where we play out Property cards like trumps in order to earn money, we kept expecting Joe to play his lowly 1 card, but he didn’t. It was a bluffer’s paradise, with people tempted to play low cards, thinking that surely THIS time Joe would play his 1 card. But he didn’t... Until the last round of the game, where it didn’t help him much. After a recount, Adam was declared winner of For Sale.

Adam 68
Andrew 62
Sam 53
Joe 49

So after two games based around the crazy high life of property development, we stumbled back into the damp November air, still giddy with talk of tens of millions of dollars. For everyone except me, it was a middling performance, but my first and second pushes me up the new leaderboard. Now all we have to do is convince Quentin to turn up again. And then somehow make him lose.

The Form Table...

						Points
Quentin	1	1	1	2	1	6
Andrew	2	1	1	3	3	10
Adam	1	4	3	3	2	13
Sam	3	3	2	2	3	13
Joe	4	2	3	2	2	13
Jonny	3	2	4	5	5	19
Dan	3	1	5	5	5	19
Steve	3	2	5	5	5	20
Andy	2	4	5	5	5	21
Sally	2	5	5	5	5	22

A few acres of tiles

2011-11-24T16:45:00.002Z

With Ashton (recovering from a chest infection) and Ava (Normal bedtime) happily tucked up in bed and dinner out the way by 18.50, an inviting 4 hours of gaming was available. Paul suggested that this week we might try to play as many quick games as possible after last sessions time eating monster A Few Acres Of Snow. Seizing my opportunity I quickly plopped Citadels, a new game to us, on the table. Although there would be a rule learning session and the obligatory "Open Hand" I thought we would probably get a game in under the hour benchmark stated on the box.

The rules didn't seem overly complex but the powers that the characters held required constant referral. For two Citadels newbies the interaction between the characters and what was a "Good" move remained elusive until near the end. Realising that I had built a whole bunch city cards and was near to closing out the game I began to choose my characters a lot more carefully. It would seem that some cards like the Bishop, Warlord and Assassin become a lot more sought after as the game progresses. It's then that you see how neatly balanced this game really is. I managed to negotiate my way through to an eighth city card and that was that. I really liked it but I could see Paul was left a little cold by it and so we hurriedly moved on to our next game....

Chris 30
Paul 16

Which was Stone Age! Oh no everybody groans..... Well I won so there, and I did so without my new tactic of throwing Paul's workers under the washing machine panning out as I had planned.

Chris 243
Paul 200

The time was 21:45, the night was still young! So we unboxed Carcassonne the Discovery. Paul hadn't played it in at least 10 years but hadn't lost any of his skill as a tile laying magician. In fact if anybody needs their bathroom doing then Paul's your man. Although you will have to be happy with a perfectly tessellated satellite picture of a fictional medieval country as thats all he does apparently. We were neck and neck all the way through but this was all balanced by whether one of Paul's early mountain dwelling meeples would be lucky enough to find the piece of land which had two corners mountain opposite two corners grassland. Twice I picked the ideal tile and quickly placed far far away. Fortunately for Paul his meeple got the map turned the right way and found the perfect tile, scoring 18 points (A lot in this game) and taking any chance of a comeback away.

Paul 117
Chris 103

We had managed to get all three in by 22:45 and not have to break any traffic laws getting Paul to his train on time. Hoorah.

Name Played Won
Chris 18 12
James 7 3
Paul 11 3

A Gentleman's Guide on How To Score

2011-11-23T22:51:00.006Z

You know, much as we all love the leaderboard and we think the Q-system of scoring is a great idea, I can’t help but notice that the gap between first and sixth is 84 points. That’s quite a gap to bridge. And even between me and Joe, there’s 31 points.

I was wondering about another leaderboard that doesn’t have these huge gaps, nor does it rely on the Points Ratio to even things up. Basically, it’s just a form table of the five most recent games each player has played with 1 point for first, 2 for second etc, This means that a poor showing one evening doesn’t effect you all season and you can work it off over time.

For those who haven’t played five games, the gaps are filled in with 5th positions, just to get them on the board, and also to tease them with the tantalizing offer of a sudden leap in places should they do well.

At first glance, I like this, just because it keeps everyone close together. Any thoughts?

The Form Table...

						Points
Quentin	1	1	1	2	1	6
Adam	3	3	2	1	1	10
Sam	2	2	3	2	1	10
Joe	3	2	2	3	2	12
Andrew	1	3	3	3	3	13
Jonny	3	2	4	5	5	19
Dan	3	1	5	5	5	19
Steve	3	2	5	5	5	20
Andy	2	4	5	5	5	21
Sally	2	5	5	5	5	22

Have it, Caesar!

2011-11-23T09:23:00.004Z

Tuesday night games saw 5 of us clustered around the table - Adam, Andrew, Joe, Quentin and myself (Sam), cracking our knuckles in anticipation as Joe walked in with a bag of new games - one of which, Lords of Vegas, did not play five, so we broke open the other, Ave Caesar. In this game players race chariots around the dusty tracks of ancient Rome, pausing only to throw a Denari in Caesar's lap - or, if you prefer, you can ignore Caesar for tactic's sake and sacrifice your laurels (or victory points) instead. If one had a big lead that might be a viable option, but as it was we were too in thrall of the Emperor (or fear of losing) and stuck to our task. The chariots are propelled by card play so there's an element of card management and an element of blocking competitors off where the track narrows or veers around corners.

The game suggests 4 races but as it was fairly lightweight we did 2 instead and found it an enjoyable filler, for some reason encouraging a lot of smutty humour. Quentin began another successful night by coming in first again, with Joe and Adam tied for second and Andrew and I placed third:

Quentin 8

Joe/Adam 7

Sam/Andrew 5

With the night reasonably young there was time for a semi-serious game, but we found it so tricky deciding in the end a Decider was chosen at random, and that turned out to be me. I plumped for Ra, hoping we'd have time for Poison afterwards. There had been talk of Torres but if it makes Adam feel any better I realised later that it only plays 2-4.

Ra's not a strong game of mine but rather than hedge my bets and try and scoop up tiles at the end of the round, a strategy that's burnt my fingers before, I opted for grabbing things early to cover the bases and avoid penalties, a system that would have paid off had it not been for the presence of the new Ratio King at the table - yes, Quentin did it again, shrugging off the odd penalty to grab first place. Adam's comprehensive collection of monuments saw him score big but he was also hampered by his Pharoah and Civilisation shortcomings. Joe suffered the Ra equivalent of darts-elbow; having collected the three highest sun tiles for round three he was reticent to spend them.

Quentin 39

Sam 37

Adam/Andrew 17

Joe 16

It was ten o'clock and while Andrew cracked opened the whisky Joe and Quentin decided to retire, making the last game a three-hander. As such, Poison was out, and after a little dalliance with the idea of Trans-America, we settled on 7 Wonders. I like this game for three, with a little foresight and guesswork you can think a move ahead rather than just in the here and now. Andrew had professed to being a little jaded by 7 Wonders recently, but you wouldn't have known it as he wiped the floor with us, going big on Military and Blue Buildings to finish just one point off Adam's record score:

Andrew 62

Sam 46

Adam 44

Nice to get three games into an evening, and just look at Quent's ratio! He did volunteer that ratio should only come into it after ten games (which we agreed to) but it's worryingly impressive all the same.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	21	94.5	4.5
Adam	19	86	4.53
Andrew	22	78	3.55
Joe	13	47	3.62
Quentin	6	31	5.17
Jonny	3	10.5	3.5
Dan	2	8	4
Steve	2	7.5	3.75
Andy	2	7	3.5
Sally	1	4.5	4.5

Not Another Stone Age Review!

2011-11-22T15:53:00.003Z

Yes.

Not being one to pass up an opportunity to play Stone Age meant that I found myself, once again, at James' house for what is becoming a bi-weekly session of games (spread over two days!). My previous high score had since been confined to the history books thanks to Sam's recent massive total and James was of a mind to reduce the gap, thus hindering any chance of a repeat performance. In the two player version the fight for resources is not as tight as it is with 3 or 4; therefore simply avoiding your opponents strategy is easier.

Hence, James collection of fields and workers was matched by my axes and huts leaving us to fight over the culture cards. Although my lead - courtesy of a little row of huts - looked quite impressive, James managed chomp away big chunks of that lead by building huts with pure GOLD! Inspired play! In the end it came down to a couple of culture cards that appeared to complete my set and the two fields left unplayed.

Chris 265.
James 199.

Our second game, Ticket to Ride, was probably as close as a game could get. Come the final tot-up I was ten points in the lead, however James had pipped me for the longest route. This brought the scores to 105 each and with four 4 tickets completed it all came down to the longest route. Which James had.

James 105
Chris 105

Bracknell Leaderboard:

(October - November)

Name Played Won

Chris 15 10

James 7 3

Paul 8 2

Which makes me look like a flat track bully....

Cold War Classic

2011-11-17T23:53:00.002Z

Whilst Sam and Andrew struggled cooperatively for control of Middle Earth (see below), Steve and I, down the road in Montpelier, went head to head with a struggle of a more modern kind.
Before Steve arrived, I had piled up a few choices, including Cuba, which we'd both played for the first time recently, and La Citta (another of The Works £7.99 wonders, one I haven't managed to play yet). I'd also included a couple of two-player games; Martin Wallace's A Few Acres of Snow, and BGG darling Twilight Struggle.
Having assessed the options we agreed that it would be wrong not to play a dedicated two-player game, given the circumstances, and I left it to Steve to make the choice. Acres would be a long rules learn, but a shorter game. Twilight Struggle (slightly) easier to grasp, much longer to play. Steve opted for Twilight Struggle.

The rules are a bit of a bear; it's not hugely complicated, but the direct conflict, zero-sum nature of the game means that you really need to be up to speed before going in. We started in on the rules description at 7.45, and an hour later we were setting up the first turn. I was USSR, Steve the free world.

The first turn took 45 mins, and was a fairly tentative affair - there were no scoring cards - and we were just finding our feet. Turn two was very different, as I held the Middle East scoring, and Steve the Asia scoring; unfortunately for Steve, I had made some in-roads into Asia in turn one, so was able to concentrate on shoring up the Middle East to maximise my score there, and in the end, Asia was a dead heat, though I scored a few points for controlling battleground countries.

Turn two had taken a bit longer, and as we went in to turn three, the early war deck had to be re-shuffled, giving the potential for a repeat scoring of Middle East and/or Asia, along with the inevitable battle for Europe.
The whole of round three was a tug-of-war for Europe, and we were beginning to get a good feel for the game. It's daunting, of course, trying to take in the situation in every region at once. But what you realise through playing is that different regions become the focus of a round if someone holds a scorecard, which makes for a more managable cognitive load.

Steve managed to keep Europe out of my grasp, but hadn't managed to do the same in the Middle East, both of which scored in the final round of turn three. My Middle East victory pulled the VP marker all the way to my 20 VP goal, and the game was up. We were both glad in some ways, because it meant we'd completed a game rather than left it hanging (Steve confided he was going to call it a night at the end of the turn); but I was more glad than Steve.

I could really get into this game, if it got played more often - if time/tiredness were not factors, I think we would have both gone in again with a much more focussed, aggressive stance. It's well-deserving of its classic status; grown-up without being dry, competitive, but with enough luck from the cards to not feel too mean. The theme is perfectly in tune with the gameplay - I like the way the influence builds up in certain hot-spots; the more influence your opponent has, the more you need to have to try and wrest control, leading to mini-skyscrapers of chits in certain places. All this, and the ever-present threat of nuclear armageddon - what more could you ask of a tuesday evening in november? JB

Lords of the Stone Age

2011-11-17T23:12:00.003Z

Today’s plan for the same game to be played in two venues at once, with messages flying back and forth was slightly scuppered when it was revealed that Joe had lent out his copy of Ascending Empires. And also there isn’t really enough down-time during a two-player game to muck about with instant messaging or texts.

In the end the two factions went their separate ways. I believe that Joe and Steve went for A Few Acres Of Snow – a two player game that Joe has been itching to get people to play. Since two-player games aren’t leaderboard (at least, not usually), Sam felt in a co-operative mood and we chose Reiner Knizia’s re imagining of The Lord Of The Rings for our opening game.

I’d played it fairly recently, so I refreshed Sam’s memory of the rules, and we got stuck in. For most of the game, it was plain sailing, with Sauron barely twitching until Helm’s Deep, at which point he dragged himself a couple of spaces in our direction. Heading into Mordor, we had plenty of shields and I was confident of a successful campaign against the rabbit-eared monolith.

However, Sauron didn’t gain his reputation for evil for no reason, and in the last round, we went from comfort and confidence to panicky fear after a string of event tiles were turned over. Mordor is very deceptive: it’s events are bad, but they’re quite easy to avoid, and so you aren’t too bothered when the next event is uncovered. But this is a false sense of security. Each event takes you closer to Sauron’s victory, and we soon found ourselves standing one space away from defeat and two spaces away from absolute victory. It all depended on the turn of one tile.

An event tile... Sauron won. And he barely moved all game.

While the game was exciting while it lasted, and we couldn’t believe our luck with dice rolls, the end is a bit of a damp squib. Still, it was nice to team up with a fellow GNN regular and battle a common foe. I mean, one who isn’t Adam, that is.

For our next game we chose Stone Age as a nice two-player. Although I never win at this game any more, I still enjoy it. It feels very Roulette-ish, with the placement of the pieces and the element of luck. And I have to admit I had quite a bit of luck. By my standards, I played a very good game – getting my highest score by far. But Sam is not a man to be taken lightly at this game. Any confidence I had at my score was obliterated at Sam racked up the highest two-player score so far (sorry, Chris. I just couldn’t stop him).

Sam 337
Andrew 249

I'll leave it for Joe to explain his adventures in the snow with Steve in another post.

The place where Bracknell and Bristol meet

2011-11-16T08:51:00.003Z

Tonight was an evening of glamour for the games night regulars as we hobbed and nobbed with Bristol’s literati to celebrate the release of Joe’s book of comic strips from the Guardian. Me (Andrew), Sam, Adam, Hannah, Steve and Anja all congregated to congratulate Joe (and his collaborator Pascal) on his success and to drink the free wine and eat the complementary nibbles (which included UK-caught Tuna among its ingredients, which is something of a rarity apparently). It was nice to all meet without a table covered in meeples between us.

But Sam and I sped back early to relieve visiting gamer Chris of his duties because he was kindly babysitting for Sam. Once there, we agreed to play a couple of light games to round off the evening. Chris was eager to try something new, but Sam was already a little too drunk to explain any rules and it was getting late so the familiar old box of Seven Wonders was brought out.

After being over-played and falling out of fashion, Seven Wonders has re-established itself as a quick game, perfect for rounding off an evening with three or four players. Not too taxing, but not too lightweight either. The first game was a exciting affair. Sam was perhaps distracted by having to cook pasta at the same time as playing, while maybe Chris had on eye on the England-Sweden game?

Chris went for the jugular and bullied his way to military might,. He insisted that he had no choice those were just the cards he got, but I’m not convinced. I quickly built up all the resources I needed in the first round, and before long I was the Mr Rockefeller of the table as people bought what they needed from me. This came in useful in round three, as I was able to spend this money and pick the choicest bluest cards. It ended:

Andrew 61

Chris 52

Sam 50

Curses! Just two points short of the highest ever score, I thought.

Sam suggested another go, since the game was already out. Even though I never win a game twice in a row, I agreed.

Once again Chris reached for his guns and fought his way into an early military lead. I went for sciences and managed to chain 5 symbols together for a healthy twenty-five points, while Sam scored highly in all categories. It was a very close game, and when my and Chris’ scores came up equal, we did wonder if it would be a three-way tie. In the end, though, Sam’s calculated play edged him home.

Sam 59

Chris 57

Andrew 57

But this week’s “official” games night will be an interesting affair. Postponed to Thursday, it consists of with two simultaneous games going on in two different venues, with carrier pigeons and semaphore to be used as means of communication throughout the night. And maybe our phones, too. I suggested that we all play one game and amalgamate the scores into one big five (or six) player game, and I think Seven Wonders may be the best choice: the top score doesn’t seem to be effected by the number of players. And it’s a lovely way to end an evening.

The GNN High Score Tables

2011-11-10T21:42:00.001Z

Hey, remember when videogame magazines had pages dedicated to high scores where people could send in their high scores, and then everyone else could look at their high scores? Well, I thought we could do something similar. I only listed games that’ve been played three times or more, and sometimes I’ve included scores for different number of players.

Agricola
Sam 46

Alhambra
Sam 141 (three players)
Sam 113 (four players)

Ascending Empires
Sam 39

Brass
Joe 191 (online version. GNN record is also Joe with 177 points)

Collosseum
Sam 96

For Sale
Andrew 68

Medici
Adam 120

No Thanks
This may be pre-blog, but I do remember Joe getting negative points once.

Poison
Chris 6 (three players)
Hannah 6 (four players)

Ra
Sam 54 (three players)
Hannah 40 (four players)

Seven Wonders
Adam 63

Stone Age
Chris 318 (two players)
Sam 265 (three players)
Adam 183 (four players)

Ticket to Ride
Adam 131

Tinners’ Trail
Sam 150 (three players)
Sam 115 (four players)

Trans America
Adam 0

Trans Europa
Sam 1 (three player)
Paul 3 (four player)

Torres: Worth it?

2011-11-10T21:16:00.009Z

My copy of Torres arrived today - all the way from Greece, it came, in exchange for Popular Front - and Andrew was good enough to pop around and give it a trial run.

The game is fairly abstract but the tacked-on theme involves building castles for the king - the bigger your castle, and the higher your knight placed in it, the more points you get in the three scoring rounds, when the size-obsessed King comes to visit. There's four turns in each round (in the two player version) where you build castles, place knights, and get to ignore the basic rules via the implementation of 'action' cards.

Andrew tried to ignore the pumpkin...

On an aesthetic level it's quite pretty if you ignore the castles, which are the colour of a 1970's bathroom suite and overtly plastic. On a strategic one it's quite a thinker; though both Andrew and I ended up with nothing to do with our action points on a given turn - that may be a slight downside to the 2-player version or possibly we haven't fully comprehended the rules yet.

But aside from that it was relatively straightforward in the rules department but with depth to the possibilities - always a good ratio, I feel. And in terms of the mechanic it's very different to anything we have on GNN; certainly anything I can recall. Tikal lets you build (or 'discover') upwards, but not with this amount of flux and manipulation. You start with a nearly-flat board and as the game progresses it builds upwards as players construct their own castles and pop around to each others to claim credit for them as well.

We ended the game intrigued by it and enthused about playing with more people. I claimed a narrow victory (251 to 241) having played the first sneaky move on round two and shot ahead - though Andrew outscored me over the next two rounds, I just held on.

Definitely one to get to the table for 3 or 4 players in the near future.

Game Time in the Smith's

2011-11-09T11:01:00.001Z

Joe's prescient comment on GNN applied all too well for Bracknell's split games nights. On the Monday I introduced James to the wonders of Stone Age. Two weeks ago Paul and I had whizzed through a game and still had time for 3 rounds of Aton. This week, with rule intake aside, we found ourselves checking that the side of the box did in fact say 60-90 minutes. Your first game of Stone Age can be a daunting experience especially against someone with a few games under their belt. As with my first game when Sam stressed the importance of culture cards and it wasn't until it was too late that I started collecting them, James found the variety of choices too enticing and embarked upon a balanced approach. Unknown to him, within the first 6 or 7 rounds, I had snaffled all of the people multipliers and was visiting the love hut with insatiable regularity. The game ended when we had exhausted the supply of civ cards which probably had something to do with the length of the game. With all of the civ cards split between us the hut, axe, field and people multipliers went nuts with scores coming up thus.

Chris 318
James 186

James revealed this was his favourite game so far. The rematch in a couple of weeks probably won't be so one sided!

On Tuesday Paul popped over again and it was decided to give new game A Few Acres Of Snow an airing. As mentioned before on the blog it is a 2 player game representing the war between Britain and France over the North East Americas. We started at about 7.30 and optimistically thought we would probably get a quick game of citadels in at the end before Paul's train at 11. Didn't really work out like that. The rules........ I had spent an hour going through them in the day to make the process a little easier when it got to game time. Unfortunately It didn't help. The game plays out like a version of Dominion and London stuck together and as with those two there is a lot of card referencing to be done. It's a game worth persevering with as once you get over the hump of your first 5 moves it starts to flow. However, to the newbie, the extended AP and constant checking of what a card does and what goes with it as well slowed play right down. By 10pm we were hitting our stride and starting to make headway toward each other after a lot of time building up our respective decks. Me, playing the French, had by 10.30 performed a successful siege and chased Paul out of Halifax after he had rudely settled in between my two villages...... then just as we were really in the swing of it it was 10.50 and time for Paul to catch his train.... We decided to score the board anyway as neither of us were anywhere near the game ending conditions.

Chris - 55
Paul - 37

Another one that is going to be played next time for sure.

Just one note on anybody thinking of buying this and wanting to do some research on the Geek. There are many threads saying that the game is "broken" and that there is an unstoppable tactic by one of the sides that works every time. Interested though I was I avoided reading them because it would ruin the game. I will probably never stumble across this tactic either so I don't need to know about it......

Cheeseburgum

2011-11-08T22:48:00.006Z

Tonight saw a plethora of gamers gathered at Joe's house - as well as the 'Cheltenham Four' (myself (Sam), Adam, Andrew and Joe) Steve and Quentin made it along too, and we decided to split into two groups of three, playing different games.

However the mood was briefly tense when Quentin ventured to suggest Joe had too many games. If Joe employed a pianist on these nights to keep the mood light, he would have stopped playing at this point. But thankfully the tension passed with Joe breaking out Hamburgum for himself, Adam and Steve and making his 'cheeseburgum' joke. The rest of us opted for Alhambra.

We'd all played it before but for Quentin there had been a number of years in the interim. But he shrugged the woolly cloak of time aside and began building Moorish temples like there was no tomorrow. Fortunately for me, I'd built a ludicrously long wall, enough to see off Quentin's gardens and late charge into Chambers:

Sam 141

Quentin 130

Andrew 82

Seven Wonders was a tighter affair, with all of us scoring big in certain colours and covering the bases - mostly - on others. But Quent's avenue of blue buildings squeezed him into top spot by the skin of his teeth:

Quentin 60

Sam 59

Andrew 50

I'm not sure what happened in Hamburgum because despite a game length on the box claiming '1 hour' they were still building churches after Andrew, Quentin and I had finished a game of Alhambra and a game of Seven Wonders. I'm sure the comments will be abuzz - but the last we heard was Joe saying "I'm in the lead, but Adam's winning". A familiar sensation to most of us I'd hazard. Eventually Hamburg must have been churched up to the gills, however, as Joe texted me the final scores:

Adam 106

Joe 86

Steve 77

Another night of high drama and starchy foods comes to an end then (one assumes) and take heed; next week will be at Joe's house on Thursday. See you then...

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	18	81.5	4.53
Adam	16	74	4.63
Andrew	19	65	3.42
Joe	11	39	3.55
Quentin	4	19	4.75
Jonny	3	10.5	3.5
Dan	2	8	4
Steve	2	7.5	3.75
Andy	2	7	3.5
Sally	1	4.5	4.5

Is this a game, or is it my science homework?

2011-11-06T01:49:00.007Z

Tonight was a special night for the GNN regulars. Tonight we were to attempt the board game High Frontier. This leviathan of a game (about exploring the Solar System) with its many rules is a sort of north face of the Eiger for semi-casual gamers such as us.

We began at seven o’clock on Saturday. I had taken precautions and read through the rules online, taking notes as I did. Joe also had read through them, and Adam too had some knowledge of the rules. Sam, however, had no idea of what the game entailed. As it turned out, this was like turning up to base camp in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops.

I am delighted at the clarity and thoroughness of my notes

After the rules were explained, the game got under way at around eight. We slowly built up our technologies and water tanks, when I decided to break free of Low Earth Orbit and set off to a new planet. Or moon. I landed on Deimos at 9.20 – the first of our group to successfully touch down on alien land! I was so excited, I wanted to text someone to boast about my achievement. Unfortunately, the only people I knew who’d be interested were with me in the room at the time.

Soon after that, Adam colonised the Moon, and Joe set off towards Jupiter or something. It’s hard to say, because he then looked at his cards, said “oh, fuck” and before long his ship had disintegrated. Sam, meanwhile, was getting frustrated. He had two thrusters to build his rocket with, but both were rubbish. They were solar sails, and one barely used any fuel until you needed to perform a “burn” at which point it became very inefficient. The other barely got you anywhere at all.

I successfully identify the playing area on the table

Adam and I continued to build up our extra-terrestrial concerns, while Joe tried again at the outer Solar System. But at 10.45 Sam discovered he couldn’t land on Mars with the ship he had, and so he resigned from the game rather than go all the way back to Earth and build a new one.

After Sam left, Adam and Joe began to prospect in the Asteroid Belt and they discovered just how mean a die can be, as one asteroid after another came up blank. Meanwhile (twelve minutes past eleven), I got some Glory points for taking a human crew to an asteroid (Phaethon) and safely back. The ticker-tape parade and extensive media coverage had to remain in my imagination, though, as Joe and Adam were too busy trying to find anywhere worth claiming as their own to acknowledge my epoch-defining achievement.

Joe and I discuss the rules. Adam can barely hide his excitement.

The game struggled on. I headed back out to Phaethon, hoping to refuel and tackle the outer Solar System, but by the time I got there, it was midnight and I was exhausted. By now Adam had succeeded in finding another asteroid worth prospecting and Joe finally got a bit of luck with a dice roll and landed and prospected on his first extra-terrestrial lump of rock. It was ten past twelve. We had been playing for four hours.

I called an end to proceedings with barely any argument from Joe and Adam, and I counted up the scores. To be honest I thought I had won, but I forgot about the scores for different types of factories. My “D” factories scored nothing at all, but Adam and Joe had other types of factories, giving them eight points each. In the end, it was:

Adam 12
Joe 10
Andrew 8

It was a game that promised a lot of geek-driven joy, but in the end did not deliver. Even I, who did quite well at the start thanks to some lucky rolls, found it quite a grind towards the end.

We ended the evening by ruefully admitting that we'll probably never play this game again, but I'm not sure. If I see someone setting this up at Stabcon, I may be tempted to join in. Assuming it's still early afternoon, that is.

It's not the game, it's the stigma

2011-11-02T00:40:00.003Z

Tonight, the gamers who arrived at Chez Sam were greeted by the sight of the kitchen table brought out from against the wall and fully extended, in expectancy of a bumper attendance. And so it was, despite a late apology from Dan there were seven around the table in two groups.

Sat at one half of the table was myself (Andrew), Joe and Quentin – making his début this season. The other half consisted of the leaderboard front-runners Sam and Adam and Jonny and Andy, also making his first appearance of the season. But if I was thinking that I'd escaped the sternest opponents that Games Night can offer, then I had forgotten about Quentin's steely-cold logical mind.

They chose Alhambra and Sam explained the rules to the newbies. Meanwhile, we chose a new game, Oregon, and Joe talked us through the game. Quentin initially claimed to be confused, but by the end of the first round, he said he'd worked out some of the subtleties of the game. At this point Joe and I should have just thrown down our cards and welcomed our new Oregon-playing Overlord. Instead, we battled on, watching helplessly as Quentin played the cards like a maestro. Before we knew it, he'd placed all his men calling an end to the game.

Quentin 59
Joe 55
Andrew 44

We glanced across at the still unfinished game of Alhambra, and we thought we had time for another game of Oregon while it was still fresh in our minds. We set off again to ruin the beautiful nature of the state of Oregon with mines, buildings, railway stations and people standing in the middle of nowhere hoping someone might put a point-scoring building right next to them.

If Joe and I thought that our familiarity with the rules may rein Quentin in, we were in for a sorry lesson. Quentin sped ahead by an even greater score than before, leaving me to rely on coal mines to just edge me past Joe in the final count.

Quentin 73
Andrew 56
Joe 52

I can't say I'm in love with Oregon. There is an awful lot of luck involved, and it's possible to find yourself staring at a hand of four cards which do nothing but offer your opponents some free points. Perhaps we were too eager to use our jokers and our extra goes too quickly. When I say “we” I mean “me and Joe,” of course.

By now, Alhambra had ended. I'll leave it to the others to describe the vicous battle over choice real estate that must have taken place. But the results were

Sam 113
Jonny 86
Adam 84
Andy 78

... but before we had ended our second game of Oregon, they had already begun a game of Trans America. Quentin bowed out of a quick game of Hey! That's My Fish, preferring to get an early night (ie, keep his points ratio intact). Joe and I played a quick non-leaderboard game of Citadel (won by Joe by enough of a margin that we didn't need to count up the scores) until Trans America had ended. This time Adam had wreaked terrible revenge for his third place in Alhambra with a whitewash of his opponents.

Adam 0
Andy 10
Jonny 12
Sam 14

This leaves the leaderboard looking more populated, with two new names added. Not much has changed in terms of position near the top, but Quentin wondered about not turning up to any more games nights, just to keep his points ratio nice and healthy. Luckily, Joe lent him Ascending Empires which means he'll have to make at least one more visit to the GNN tables to return it. And then we'll get him, good and proper.

Right, guys?

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	16	72.5	4.53
Adam	15	69	4.6
Andrew	17	59	3.47
Joe	10	35	3.5
Jonny	3	10.5	3.5
Quentin	2	10	5
Dan	2	8	4
Andy	2	7	3.5
Sally	1	4.5	4.5
Steve	1	4.5	4.5

Henchman Hunches

2011-10-31T10:42:00.004Z

A couple of weeks back everyone was kind enough to let me inflict my embryonic best-selling game Henchman upon them. At some stage I'd like to do it again (not this week!) and have designed a slightly more pleasing board and purchased some lovely meeples to that end, so aesthetically it should be a more enjoyable experience (though in the short term the Henchmen will still look remarkably like my business cards).

I've been mulling it over and come up with some changes:

There are now just four types of Follower, clearly labelled with their type and value:

B (Bishop) - 6

K (Knight) - 5

C (courtier) - 4

S (sentinel) - 3

The followers no longer have a 'specialist area' where they score more (too fiddly I think) and I've scrapped the advisors. Each player starts with one Bishop, one Knight, two Courtiers and two Sentinels, and it'll be possible to generate extra followers during gameplay (the same Followers you start with will be available 'for purchase' - i.e. another Bishop, Knight, and two each of the less valuable pieces).

There are now SIX areas to put your followers in. The Keep, Chapel, Chambers, Cloister and Court all get you influence (ie victory) points, and there are points for finishing 1st/2nd/3rd in these places. Additionally the Court (no matter where you place) gives you the option of trading in money to raise additional followers. Paying for extra followers costs you twice their value PLUS the number of the current round - - so a Bishop costs 12+1 gold to recruit in round one, a Sentinel costs 6+6 in round six, etc.

So how do you generate money?

You raise money by placing followers in the sixth area, the Treasury, and the money they raise is equivalent to their value; so a Bishop in the treasury would get you 6 gold, a Knight would get you 5 gold and so on.

Apart from the Cloister, there are limits to how many followers can go in each area - Keep (10), Court (8), Chambers (6), Treasury and Chapel (4 each).

Placement remains almost as it was when we played; in player order, as many or as few followers as you want (into one area at a time) and you can return to areas you've already placed followers in to add more. EXCEPTIONS: You may only lay ONE FOLLOWER AT A TIME into the Treasury.

I hope this ups the ante in terms of encouraging people to get more followers - I know we played an abridged version last time but it felt like getting more followers didn't help much - with this new system I think if you don't get more followers you might find your early lead would be exactly that, and nothing more.

Oh, and there's a useable dungeon now. I'm returning to my original idea of Henchman cards sending opposition pieces to the dungeon for one round. (Again, this will encourage more followers). So when you play a Henchman card you send your opposing player's LOWEST-SCORING follower in that area to the dungeon.

Henchman cards are still played in turn order, but now they are played ONE AT A TIME - and you can pass. As before, you can play multiple Henchman cards to the same area, and use 2 Henchman cards for one area as a joker to be played into another. When all four players pass the Henchman round is over - so if you pass hoping to see what others do and they all pass too, you CANNOT lay Henchman cards. Mwah ha ha! - etc.

Finally - you can only pick up Henchman cards by playing a Follower into the Cloister. That's where they hang out, see? There'll still be a display of 4 cards face-up at the start of each round, and you can take from there OR the top card on the deck. And there won't be Henchman cards for the Treasury, so your Followers are safe in there!

Finally the King is still around, and he is worth +4 in court and +2 in any area - except the dungeon, where he cannot be placed, and the Treasury, where he will give the HIGHEST SCORING player an extra 3 Gold. If there is a tie for highest scoring player they get an extra 1 gold each. The starting player places the King but DOES NOT lay any followers - he must wait for his next turn.

I think that's it. This is what I'm mooting for the scoring areas (1st/2nd/3rd)

Cloister (unlimited placement): 6/3/1

Keep (max 10 Followers): 8/4/2

Chambers (max 6 Followers): 9/5/3

Court (max 8 Followers) 10/6/4

Chapel (max 4 Followers): 12/7/5

Ties for position share the points (rounded down).

Treasury: (max X Followers): Does not score.

(X: number of players.)

What I'm hoping is there'll be some levels of intrigue to it, and some different ways of winning that aren't just going after the Chapel every time. But only by playing will we truly know...

Down through the centuries (and along the M4)

2011-10-27T09:17:00.003+01:00

This weeks round of games nights here at Bracknell separated over two nights confirmed something to me which I had suspected for a little while now. Martin Wallace's London should never have been sold as a two player game. The restrictions that a third or fourth player puts on the resources is impossible to over come without some major tinkering. I had spent some time on the BGG forums looking for a suitable solution but could find none that didn't shoe horn a raft of severe changes that could actually make it worse. With these problems in mind James and I (Chris) embarked on a game on Monday night as I was keen to introduce him to a more heavy euro game. London is a fairly tricky game to explain even to seasoned gamers and I felt James dealt manfully with the 'cognitive load'. After a few openish rounds he was buying boroughs and opening shops left right and centre. However with all these types of game the first attempt is often a training game (Unless you are Adam or Hannah.) and what your objective should be isn't apparent until it's over. So it wasn't a surprise that I ran out the winner...

Chris 89
James 62

The game is not a short one and with the rule learning thrown in it was all we could play that night.

On Tuesday Paul made his bi-weekly pilgrimage to Bracknell for some good clean honest gaming fun.

We started off with a couple of games of Aton. With a few games under our belts we are starting to see the subtle strategies involved in this seemingly innocuous game. The first match was a straight fight for Black bonus squares and temple number 4. The second evolved into quite a difference of approach as I discovered cramming the first temple with all my counters changed the pattern of the game completely. Both matches swung my way finishing thus;

Chris 40
Paul 17

Chris 54
Paul 32

Then we moved onto a personal favourite and GNN classic Stone Age. Paul professed after the game that he hadn't actually 'Got it' until today and his new found enlightenment certainly provided a close game. Stone Age is a game which scales to two player perfectly, and with the reduction in huts to two stacks of seven it creates a further aspect of being able to effect the timing of the games end. We found our game ending prematurely with half the deck of civilisation cards left to go. The final tot up saw my civ card haul match Paul's impressive hut multiplier but my better axes and field scores pushed me ahead.

Chris 151
Paul 141

We had just enough time for Paul to thrash me at a third game of Aton as my wacky temple 1 obsession backfired on me.

Paul 40
Chris 22

The Cuban Facile Crisis

2011-10-26T01:09:00.004+01:00

Today's game was in memory of Joe’s skeletal and rather stinky cat, Otto, who this week finally went to the great cat basket in the sky. Or, in this case, outside the back door. Otto was around twenty years old by the time he died, and Joe regaled us of Otto’s mysterious life, such as the month he went missing, only to reappear one day smelling of old woman’s perfume.

To celebrate Otto’s passing, we decided to play a brand new game which is far too complicated to be called “fun” but what the Hell. There were four of us: myself (Andrew), Joe, Steve and Adam and the game was called Cuba. To be exact – Cuba: El Presidente, since we played it with the extension pack.

Joe talked us through the rules, most of which resembled rules from other games. It was pretty confusing, with a smorgasbord of cardboard pieces and board-areas to comprehend, and it took us an hour before we were ready to start. The first round was marked by Steve’s usual confusion over the rules, as he misunderstood the need to keep certain goods in his warehouse or lose them. This left him with no goods and only one peso to his name going into round two.

But his woes didn’t last long. In such a complicated game there are always ways to score points, and mid-game it was Adam in the lead with Steve and Joe vying for second with me in last. My mistake was to buy the casino – a building that offered the chance to exchange money for victory points. I think I was a bit swayed by Adam’s success with pubs in our last game of St Petersburg, but in this game, there always seemed to be a better way of getting points so my casino turned out to not be such a great move after all.

The game is cruel, especially in the final stages when you realise that an extra coin or one more resource would get you extra points. But by then, it’s all futile. It seems that there’s no point in buying buildings in the latter stages of the game, since they won’t have time to pay for themselves. And bidding for votes in the last round seems to be a double-edged sword, which could hurt you as much as your opponent. In other words, a really rubbish sword. One that you wouldn’t want in the house, let alone use as a last resort when trying to catch up with Adam.

By the end, we’d played long past eleven o’clock and it was with some relief that the last round came to an close. We couldn’t catch Adam, who was able to extend his lead in the final stage. I caught up with Joe in the final round, with Steve coming in second.

Adam 63
Steve 57
Andrew 54
Joe 54

I enjoyed Cuba, despite it's rather convoluted rules and not-too-clear rule book. It was always pretty close. It's one of those games where you win by doing what your opponents aren't doing. I also think that getting some sort of idea about when to be starting player is important. I can't tell if it's deep, or just really nit-picky.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	14	64.5	4.61
Adam	13	60	4.62
Andrew	15	52	3.47
Joe	8	28	3.5
Dan	2	8	4
Sally	1	4.5	4.5
Steve	1	4.5	4.5
Jonny	1	2.5	2.5

Photo credits: Joe

Late night in St Petersburg

2011-10-21T01:16:00.004+01:00

Perhaps today saw the dawn of a new rule: no new games to be learnt after 9.30. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tonight started early with Sam, Joe and myself (Andrew) warming up with a quick game of Hey! That’s My Fish! As is only proper for such a cartoonish game, we played it completely straight as if we were up against Karpov or Kasparov. I don’t remember the scores (it was non-leaderboard) but Sam won, followed by myself, then Joe.

Adam arrived and Alhambra was brought out from the games cupboard. After its recent début a couple of weeks ago where I came stony last, I was interested to see if I learnt from my mistakes. I didn’t, since I didn’t didn’t manage my hand or cards as efficiently as the other three, but I did avoid running out of cards completely, so some improvement there. Sam, Adam and Joe, meanwhile, always had a healthy handful yet still managed to complain bitterly about their limited choices. I guess there’s a middle road to be travelled, somewhere between hoarding and thrift.

Joe spent a lot of time fretting about the Arcades, hoping to sneak an improbable win due to everyone else having the same number of Arcades thus giving him more points despite being in second. Adam focussed on high-scoring Chambers and Towers, and got first place in both building types. But Sam took first place overall with a neat display of firsts and seconds across the board, matched with a nice long wall. You know: to keep the riff-raff out.

Sam 109
Adam 106
Joe 92
Andrew 89

At 9.30, the night was still young. But we forgot that we were not. St Petersburg was chosen as a nice game to wind down with. It promised a 45 minute game on the box, and we had memories of it being quite a quick game. But tonight, it stretched out to Tolstoy-esque proportions. Sam was given a quick résumé of the rules by Adam, and I listened in for a quick refresher. I also commented on the similarity to the "aristocrat" counter's semblance to a photo of Joe I took on my aging mobile phone of him at dusk looking thoughtfully out to sea. He didn't believe me, so here it is...

Once we started the game I had a massive stroke of good luck. Without really thinking, I chose a gold miner as one of my first cards. Then three more came up in the next round, so I was able to buy them for ever decreasing costs! This set me up quite nicely with a large income early on in the game. So I began to focus on big-scoring buildings.

Meanwhile, everyone else picked up some aristocrat cards to give them a second lot of income, and before long my monetary advantage had gone. Adam invested in two pubs, allowing him to exchange roubles for victory points (those Russians do love their alcohol). Sam seemed confused for much of the game, but still played a balanced game with a good mix of cards. Joe was upset at some of the less narratively coherent gameplay choices. Specifically, why would you want to change Peter the Great into a Carpenter's Workshop?

I’m not sure St Petersburg is at its best at the end of an evening. I forgot some of the rules, and I think we all did, since asking to take a go back and do it again was pretty common. And even I started to get impatient by the end, so I can imagine how Sam felt since he had the early shift with his kids next morning. But at the end was a set of results that you wouldn’t believe if you’d seen it in a movie:

Adam 120
Andrew 111
Joe 111
Sam 111

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	14	64.5	4.61
Adam	12	54.5	4.54
Andrew	14	48.5	3.46
Joe	7	24.5	3.5
Dan	2	8	4
Sally	1	4.5	4.5
Jonny	1	2.5	2.5

Do You Want To Play a Game?

2011-10-19T21:42:00.003+01:00

Having missed out on the last THREE get-togethers, I thought I'd post up what little gaming I've managed to get done outside the GNN fold. Since last monday's impromptu game of Alhambra at mine, I've only managed to play one game. One third of a game, truth be told. But it was Twilight Struggle.

I had my mate Pascal staying on sunday and monday nights. He plays a lot of chess, and as a result is fairly skeptical about my obsession with 'modern games'. That is to say, he totally gets the obsession bit; the cardboard sniffing, the rules ingesting, the meeple fondling — him having had a long-standing thing about new pens — but he still needs convincing that they're actually worth playing.

I've slowly begun to win him over. Earlier in the year, he and his girlfriend Helen stayed and we introduced them to Settlers. I say 'we'; you all know about Charlotte's galeforce indifference to gaming — but she does like a bit of Settlers, and a bit of Alhambra too, in a casual, after-dinner sort of way. She draws the line at Stone Age.

Settlers went down well, as I thought it would. And more recently, Pascal and I have managed a game of Dominion, which he grasped quickly and enjoyed. A couple of traditional gateway games; one a tried and true classic, the other a very clever mechanic, together designed to illicit that face they do on cornflake adverts after taking the first mouthful — the pleasantly surprised 'I had no idea boardgames could be this much fun — I'm going to have to re-design my entire life so that it revolves around them' kind of face.

So this visit, I cast about for the obvious 'next step'. Alhambra? Stone Age? A five-hour card-driven chit-based war game about the Cold War?

Pasc doesn't need patronising — if he's going to get in to something, he wants to get as much of what it has to offer from the word go, really. Added to which, we have a shared love of espionage thrillers, steely movies like Le Samurai, The Ipcress Files, and much more recently Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; films that don't hide behind special-effects and chrome, but evoke a cool, dark world of international intrigue.

That all said, I hadn't played Twilight Struggle, which was, of course, the main reason behind my deciding it was the one we needed to play this time. And I wanted to show him that games could be grown-up; that they're not all trolls and zombies, or resource-management. Or zombie management.

Sunday night, I mentioned it, and showed him the box. On monday during the day, he brought the subject up a couple of times, but it wasn't until about 9.30 on monday evening, after sausages, cider and red wine, that we actually got the board out. 'Right, just tell me which are the snakes and which are the ladders', he wisecracked.

Despite being someone who actively dislikes learning rules, he absorbed them patiently, and by 10pm we were embarking on the first round. By midnight, we were finishing the second round, and I suggested we might pack it in. It had been a hugely steep learning curve, and while I was sure I'd want to try again sometime, I was suffering the effects of a vastly heavy cognitive load. And the Drambuie was out, too.

But Pasc, quite rightly really, wanted to push on — we'd only just got to grips with the rules, after all.

In the end we got to the end of round four, the first of the mid-war rounds. And his instinct to keep going was spot on, because the game really did click. Those last two rounds were much more aggressive, vying for influence in all seven regions of the board, and hatching longer term plans. I can see how deep it could get, once you know the cards, and the likelihood of scoring rounds in each stage of the game - pushing operations in South America to force your opponent to take his eye off the ball in the Middle East(to anyone who knows the game I'm going to sound like a total noob, I appreciate).

I think Pasc enjoyed it — I know he enjoyed having a tour of the upper-echelons of the hobby.

It would take a long, rainy sunday in the black mountains to really make the most of a game like Twilight Struggle. But for someone who confessed earlier in the evening to having fond memories of Cluedo, he certainly stepped up to the plate. And I have him to thank for finally getting TS to the table.

Oh and he won. As Russia. Well he didn't really win, because we only played four rounds, right?

And I was reading the rules for both of us. And it was beginners luck. Look let's just say he was in the lead when we abandoned the game.

When your creations turn against you

2011-10-19T00:07:00.001+01:00

Tonight, games night had a slightly different atmosphere. Instead of playing the latest game bought by Sam or Joe in a moment of weakness, we were play-testing Sam’s very own gaming creation, Henchman.

In this game, each player has to gain favour with the King by winning control of various parts of the castle. To do this, each player places his pieces in turn, but the pieces’ identity (and, thus, their scoring potential) is kept a secret until the end of that round. Then, once everyone’s pieces are identified, it’s possible for each player to send in their henchman (in the form of cards you have in your hand) to try and tip the balance in one area. A cross between Stone Age and El Grande, really. The King is dying (yet is still surprisingly mobile) and the winner gets to be the King’s heir!

Once we started, we soon ironed out any unfair, incomplete or unworkable rules in the first round so that the rest of the game ran pretty smoothly. Once I got into it, I started to enjoy it and I liked the idea of just sending a single weak piece into one area with the hope that your Henchmen can force a win. When I was starting player, I had the chance to place the King, so I put him in the Throne Room, hoping that the lure of maximum points would entice the other three players into a big fight while I scored points in the other areas. As it turned out, that didn’t happen and I was able to win it quite easily, giving me a healthy score for that round which carried me through to the end of the game.

Andrew 84
Adam 81
Jonny 62
Sam 45

Sam’s distant last place made him cry out “I’ve invented a game I’m shit at!” which means that he joins Dr Frankenstein (creator of his monster), Dr Faust (his deal with the Devil) and Simon Fuller (the Spice Girls) in creating something that quickly grew out of his control.

But I’m sure that with a little fine-tuning, there’s definitely a neat little game here. There is a dungeon area on the game board, but no real way to send pieces there. If you could do that, then it may add a little spice, as those in the lead get pegged back by those desperately floundering in fourth.

After this, Jonny left and the three of us decided to have a quick leaderboard game because, God knows, we don’t have enough points on there already. Sam and Adam chose Trans America and although I’m shockingly bad at this game, I agreed. For a while (ie, the first round) it looked like my fortunes may be changing as Adam kindly helped me link all five cities. But following that, the game fell back into a familiar pattern as I crashed out in two rounds (scoring eight and six points).

Sam 3
Adam 10
Andrew 14

Meanwhile, the leaderboard continues to reward those who have nothing better to do with their weekday evenings so for just one day, I've decided to order it according to points ratio.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	12	54.5	4.54
Sally	1	4.5	4.5
Adam	10	44.5	4.45
Dan	2	8	4
Andrew	12	41.5	3.46
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Jonny	1	2.5	2.5

Copper bottoms out while tin foils plans

2011-10-13T23:34:00.005+01:00

Today was the first “proper” games night of the week (ie, one that had been arranged more than twenty-four hours in advance) and four doughty players (Me – Andrew, Sam, Jonny and Adam) were in attendance for the feast of joy that is Board Games.

Adam and I arrived bang on time, seemingly not jaded at all after three games evenings in the space of a week. While three of us waited for Jonny to arrive, we tried a simple yet cunning game called “Hey, That’s My Fish!” In this game, penguins hop from one chunk of floating ice to another, collecting fish and leaving gaps wherever they once stood. Each player must be careful not to get trapped behind these gaps, but Sam showed himself to be the master of cutting himself off with a plentiful supply of fish that he can take at his leisure. It was non-Leaderboard, but just for the sake of complete-ness the scores were Sam 35, Adam 30, Andrew 30.

Then Jonny arrived and he chose Tinners’ Trail as tonight’s main event. We set up and set about filling Cornwall with water-logged holes as we chased the price of tin and copper up and down the markets. I began with a simple strategy: finish ahead of Adam and you're bound to finish first. A strategy that, for once, was not true.

Adam started slowly, investing no money at all in the first round. I had the (slightly soggy) East Cornwall area all to myself for most of the game while the other three battled for the rest of the county. But Adam was on the receiving end of some poor rolls and despite an incredible run in the final round where he actually earned over £100, he couldn’t make up for his early slow start.

But as the final round began, I couldn’t tell who was in the lead. Myself, Jonny and Sam all had quite a presence on the investor board/score track. In the end, Sam took the first place, with me in second and Adam taking third from Jonny right at the end.

Sam 115
Andrew 108
Adam 101
Jonny 100

Afterwards, Adam told me how I could’ve played it differently so as to win, but I think he was just sublimating the desire to tell himself how he could’ve avoided third.

After that, Jonny sped home and Sally was tempted by the lure of the Leaderboard to a game of “Hey, That’s My Fish!” Adam was keen to play again, suspecting the game had hidden depths. Sally was given a guide to the rules – of which there are only two, more or less. The game was fast and deadly (for the fish) and by the end the scores told a very interesting story.

Sam 28
Sally 26
Andrew 24
Adam 22

Adam, for the first time in months, finished a game outside the top three. Meanwhile, Sam surged ahead with his second win of the night.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	11	49.5	4.5
Adam	9	40.5	4.5
Andrew	11	38.5	3.5
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Dan	2	8	4
Sally	1	4.5	4.5
Jonny	1	2.5	2.5

Peak Games

2011-10-12T11:45:00.002+01:00

On the same night that we overdosed on strategy, Chris had summoned the Bracknell group...

+++++

Another instalment of the Bracknell GNN saw Paul and Chris (me) join up after James explained he couldn't make it earlier in the day.

We decided to kick the evening off with Aton, a new game to Paul. After listening intently to my 'expert' explanation of the rules he manfully tried to look less confused than he actually was and agreed to proceed. My recent experience and Paul's lack of showed early on as I bounded round the scoring track and filled up the temples with blue counters as I went. After the first scoring round I was in a commanding position. However, the penny dropping in Paul's mind was almost audible as he embarked on a determined fightback. Alas to no avail as a second scoring round saw me launch over the line.

Chris 45
Paul 28

Buoyed by his finishing charge and the realisation that the black squares really are a winning move, Paul asked if we could play another game of Aton. The first game had finished quickly and it wasn't even 8pm yet so we set up another round. As is typical with this more abstract type of game, once my opponent actually grasps the rules I'm often left clinging to their coat tails as they forge a path of superior tactics and logic. Paul duly obliged and by the end of the first scoring round was in a formidable 10 point lead. I shifted my strategy to one of trying pinch cheap points to close the gap but unfortunately Paul cottoned on to this and began to block. The game ended a closer affair than the final scores suggest, Paul getting a couple of useful 4's in his hand before the final scoring round.

Paul 44
Chris 33

With the night still young we moved on to our main game of the evening. Paul quite graciously accepted my request and puppy dog eyes to play London, a game introduced to us by Sam at Septcon. After a quick rules refresher we were off, blue prints in hand and appointments in the book to see the bank manager in the morning. Early on it would seem that we both had the more cautious approach of the three player game in our memories as we both made small display stacks and concentrated on building as much money as possible. Slowly it dawned on us that the resource restriction of a third player wasn't there and you could play as expansively as you liked. Paul in particular raced ahead in his stack building and showing an utter contempt for the arts and culture as he proceeded to build an empire based on hard economic reality. I however, saw that Paul was starting to burn himself out and plumped for a borough domination tactic and a balanced stack. As we two mavericks of industry forged ahead poverty became a thing of the past in our utopian society. Finally as the two hour mark neared and we had exhausted the card deck the final tot up showed that my 11 boroughs and 6 underground stations out weighed Paul's card victory point haul.

Chris 116 (Money=10, Boroughs=57, VP Cards=25, VP=24, Pov=0)
Paul 100 (Money=13, Boroughs=38, VP Cards=30, VP=19, Pov=0)

I like this game even more now I have played it again but I would have liked to have seen a more restrictive two player version than simply a smaller card display.... Maybe the BGG community has some suggestions..

Just another day in Junkie Town

2011-10-11T23:40:00.003+01:00

Like alcoholics pretending that there’s nothing wrong in having a sixth drink because you’ve already finished the fifth and because you’re going to have a seventh, the GNN regulars sent out a call for any attendees this evening for a quick game. Myself (Andrew) and Adam heeded the call and, for the third time in four days the Leaderboard was called into action.

We chose Eketorp as our first game of the evening. This game of Viking-placement is still new and with naive excitement coursing through his veins, Sam started out by sending five of his men to pick up one bit of granite. While he got the piece of granite, it did mean that Adam and me were able to take the rest of the materials without too much opposition. This left Sam in a position of disadvantage that he never really recovered from.

As a three-player game, the balance of the game changed slightly, and there seemed to be far less combat this time. Adam picked up high-scoring materials almost without opposition. Before long, Adam had five -sixths of his castle built and Sam and I were playing catch-up. But Sam turned against me in the final round in a last desperate attempt at getting second place, and although he managed to scurry away with some turf, it was too little too late.

Adam 43
Andrew 30
Sam 15

It’s quite a different game with fewer players, and think it may be better the more people there are. It’s a bit difficult to say, since we’ve only played it twice.

We then searched for another short-ish hour-long game to fill up that annoying final forty-five minutes before we really should have finished. We chose Trans America, and discovered that this was the first time that Adam played the “Vexation rule”. Unfortunately, it was second nature to him, and he easily strode to his second win of the evening.

Adam 2
Sam 8
Andrew 13

I can have no complaints about my third place. In the first round I had some very lucky cards, but spent too much time fretting over my one far-flung station to wrap the round up as quickly as I should.

Although the leaderboard may look a bit daunting for the newcomer, don’t forget, there are plenty of ways to win apart from not having anything to do with your weekday evenings except endlessly racking up points in one game after another.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	9	38.5	4.28
Adam	7	34.5	4.93
Andrew	9	30.5	3.39
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Dan	2	8	4

Henn Lays a Golden Egg

2011-10-11T09:45:00.010+01:00

The call came in at just before 7pm: Joe was doing impromptu games. Despite feeling exhausted I knew the thought of handling meeples would keep me awake if I went to bed - is there a support group for this? - so off I went, joining Adam and Andrew at Joe's house - which unbeknownst to us, disappointed Joe. He was hoping for just one opponent to play A Few Acres of Snow with.

Instead we broke out Alhambra - new to me, but not the others who had played some time back. This is a Dirk Henn creation, he of Eketorp and the highly-rated (on BGG, at least) Shogun.

Each player in this game is building their own version of Alhambra - starting with a central fountain they lay tiles around it representing various buildings, sometimes walled, sometimes not. As long as they are accessible from the central fountain these castles can take on any kind of shape - much the same method the Moors adopted for the real deal, I imagine - and to counter your building efforts you need to choose whether to take your turn laying a tile, or collecting the money that allows you to buy a tile in the first place. Come the three scoring rounds players score for the amount of buildings they have for each colour - naturally, the most contested buildings are the most valuable.

It's very easy to pick up but deceptively deep, with room for strategy. When is the right time to buy a building? When to pick up cash? Do you use your 'reserve' and keep a building for the future, when it'll maximise your design (longest walls in each castle score points, so the layout needs to bear this in mind as well as the limitations of the tiles themselves). A little gem in the mechanic is the ability to take more than one turn if you pay for a building with the exact price - not always possible when the money cards come up randomly, with random numerical values.

Joe shot off into an early lead in the first scoring round as the rest of us bunched together. Andrew was looking healthy in the second round but slipped back on the third and final round, as Joe came slightly unstuck courtesy of some unrewarding gardens. My uncontested middle-range building allied to a very long wall saw me into comfortable second, but long-game-visionary Adam reaped the rewards of his investment in the most monied buildings to claim first place:

Adam 105

Sam 103

Joe 92

Andrew 68

This game ticked a lot of boxes for me - fun, looks good, easy to play but with depth, and over quickly enough to squeeze in another game afterwards, in this case Poison, a perennial filler everyone is amenable to.

My starting hand had a lot of green poison cards and, though this game is still a bit of a mystery as to what the best tactics are (the obvious ones being obvious to your fellow players as well) the freedom of laying them wherever you like does seem to help. In a tight first round I picked up no cards and nobody scored over 10. The second hand saw me strike it lucky again with a series of low-value cards, with which I managed - inadvertently - to screw over Joe, who picked up a hefty 19 points. Andrew, Adam and I were still in close contention though, and Adam took the lead after round three. But I managed to pull it back for another win in a high-scoring third round:

Sam 18

Adam 22

Andrew 24

Joe 35

Thanks for hosting Joe.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	7	31.5	4.5
Adam	5	24.5	4.9
Andrew	7	23.5	3.36
Joe	5	16.5	3.3
Dan	2	8	4

Bite my finger

2011-10-09T00:09:00.002+01:00

The call went out this afternoon for potential gamers since Sam found he had an evening to himself. Myself (Andrew) and Dan (a gamer from the pre-GNN period of our history) were available. And in our eagerness to get as many names on the leaderboard as possible, Sam and I decided that this was an official GNN evening. So we got out the referee’s armbands, whistles and timepieces and got down to work.

We chose Citadels as our game. Easy to learn, yet tense enough to make you mistrust your fellow man. We explained the rules to Dan, and the game commenced. I found myself on the receiving end of both the assassin and the thief in round one, effectively giving the other two an one-round head-start. But that’s all part of the game, isn’t it? Dan generously missed a go in the next round when he forgot he was the thief until it was far too late. Sam built lots of green buildings but then was too scared to chose the Merchant since he figured it would be a prime target for the assassin.

I battled back, with two “six coins for eight points” cards boosting my score, and Sam went for an early shut-out by building a lot of lesser cards. In the end, the game was surprisingly close. If the Bishop hadn’t been killed in the final round, I would have won. Meanwhile Sam discovered in some post-match analysis that he could have come first if he’d used his Warlord instead of building. But in the event Dan came away winner.

Dan 35
Sam 34
Andrew 31

A “quick” game of Trans-America was suggested. Again, Dan was a newcomer to the rules, but this is a game that needs barely any introduction, and he was soon up to speed. I started well, winning the first two rounds, but then I was stung for nine points in the third. Sam won the last two rounds to take first place overall.

Sam 5
Andrew 13
Dan 14

Oh, and the explanation for the post title? During the evening, Dan told us about some unused footage from the documentary about monkeys he’s currently making, which involved an alpha male monkey bumming another monkey while a third monkey pushed his finger in his mouth in some weird primate fetish. Unfortunately, some people taking photos can clearly be seen at the edge of the screen. Otherwise it may have been usable.

Bloody tourists.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Sam	5	21.5	4.3
Andrew	5	17.5	3.5
Adam	3	14.5	4.83
Joe	3	10.5	3.5
Dan	2	8	4

Pillage idiots

2011-10-05T08:49:00.004+01:00

Tonight saw just the four of us (myself, Sam, Joe and Adam) begin a new season. There was no opening ceremony, but I inwardly enjoyed the brief feeling of being joint top in points ratio before the first game began.

We chose Ascending Empires, the deceptively tactical game of space exploration. At first, it's all about vectors and velocities, as players flick their tiny ships across the galaxy (and Einstein was right – the space-time continuum is curved. In fact, it bends down slightly towards the edges) but before long, a clever use of tech levels is required to increase your options.

Joe continued to suffer from twitch-finger but more than made up for it with a canny exploitation of what resources he did have. One of his tech levels allowed him to place men on unoccupied planets, so he spent most of the last few rounds mining. He ended with only four planets on the board, but he also had a large pile of victory points sitting in front of him. I became increasingly obsessed by my inability at finding a grey planet. Adam's intergalactic space empire stretched across the board, with cities almost everywhere. Meanwhile, Sam forgot that just having a presence in all four quadrants isn't enough for a bonus – you need cities there too. His dreams of a six point bonus evaporated, and left him in third.

Joe 24
Adam 22
Sam 21
Andrew 18

A wise man once said “a man who has one watch always knows the time. A man who has two watches is never sure.” Well, the same applies to people describing the rules of a board game. It was still early, so we decided to try a new game, Ekethorp.

Sam may have had the rule book in front of him, but it was Joe who'd read the forums on Boardgamegeek. And so Sam's reading was often interrupted by Joe adding or correcting a little detail. After each interjection, Joe would then say “and that's all I know! I don't know any more” and he'd insist that Sam continue. And then a minute or so later, Joe would remember something else he'd read and would mention that, too.

As for the game, it involves secretly choosing where to place your men (Vikings) on the board in order to get the randomly placed materials, or to attack your opponents castle and steal materials from there. A sort of cross between Stone Age and Garibaldi. Since it was everyone's first go, I'm not sure if anyone had any real tactics. Adam went for the high scoring materials while I went for cheap stuff that no one else would want, hoping to get the bonus points for having completed my castle (which I missed out on by one brick. I mean – a castle with just one brick missing is as good as any other castle, right?). No one was quite sure what Joe was doing.

Adam 37
Andrew 35
Sam 29
Joe 13

An interesting game, pretty tense and nervy. The battles between Vikings were decided by use of cards from 1-6 and there seemed to be an awful lot of sixes out there. That was perhaps the least satisfying aspect of the game, but still I enjoyed it and would happily play it again.

Amazingly, after that game, it was still early. At least, that's what Sam insisted, despite what the clock said, so a quick game of For Sale was agreed upon. Until Sam remembered he never wins For Sale, so it was changed to No Thanks.

Sam 28
Adam 35
Andrew 37
Joe 40

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Adam	3	14.5	4.83
Sam	3	12.5	4.17
Joe	3	10.5	3.5
Andrew	3	10.5	3.5

Bracknell Discoveries

2011-10-04T12:49:00.003+01:00

Monday night saw two of the Bracknell branch members (There's only three of us) James and Chris (Me) take to the table again.

Having played the original version of Carcassonne several times we were quite interested to give the game's Discovery variation a play. This version is sold as game in its own right rather than as an expansion, where the fields remain but the cloisters, roads and cities are replaced by individual cities, mountains and seas. The scoring for these areas, although similar has some crucial differences where incomplete areas can be scored - albeit for less points - during play, meaning there was a steady build up of points. Also the escalating contention for the high scoring farms is completely eradicated thereby removing the single winning route to victory that the first version suffers from.

So to the game itself. Initial scoring was spread equally between us but after a run where I picked up a bunch of tiles with cities on I was able to place myself in a strong position and scored accordingly. This proved to be enough as I held off a determined fight back by James to win by 20 points. On reflection we both enjoyed the Discovery version but rather felt that we liked elements of both.

On to our second game of the evening, Aton. Some 3 weeks ago James and I attempted to play this but after one and a half frustrating games we decided to pack it away as neither of us were enjoying it at all. In our eyes it didn't seem to work and was very unbalanced. Convinced that we must have interpreted the rules incorrectly we took another look. Sure enough we had. The crux of Aton is whether you get to place your tokens in the temples first or second but equally important you both get to remove your opponents tokens as well. We had been playing that only the winner of Cartouche 2 got to do that, and as it was generally a low number that won, nobody had a card high enough to remove any counters and the temples just filled up.

Unfortunately for me James is rather good at playing this type of game and wiped the floor with me in the first tie winning by 51 points to 23. In the second match I faired a little better and took the game to an exercise in brinkmanship as we both hovered by the 40 point winning margin. However it was James again who prevailed as I dealt myself a hand of kakka poo and my exchange token had already been used. James sailed past the 40 point mark and into a 2 - 1 lead on the night.

Aton is a great, quick little game with some subtlety to it and is a much much better game if you play by the correct rules

Season ends on an Indian Summer

2011-09-27T23:55:00.008+01:00

The weather was balmy and warm, and while we enjoyed an Indian Summer outside, we also enjoyed an evening of Taj Mahal inside. I'll admit to feelings of apprehension as the board was set up on Sam's kitchen table but with four out of the five of us (myself, Sam, Quentin, Adam and Joe) keen to try, it was the only choice especially after the buzz created by last night's post.

But they say you learn from your mistakes, and since I made many mistakes last night, I must have learnt a lot. Early honours went to Sam, who sped off with the apparent aim of repeating his recent victory. I got into an early scrap with Joe, but with five players it was rare that there wasn't some kind of battle for one item or another during each round.

Halfway through, Quentin sat back and declared that he now understood the rules and that he thought it was a very clever game. Adam played a wildly romantic game, refusing to back down on battles, even if it left him with only two cards. Despite his apparent confusion with the rules, he proved himself to be the king of links, with a snaking line of palaces crossing many provinces which helped him pick up many points each time he added to it.

Meanwhile, I carefully nurtured my hand of cards which left me in a position of power for most of the later part of the game. By then I was able to exploit my collection of elephants and pick up some goods in several late rounds which catapulted me up the score track.

Andrew 60
Adam 40
Sam 36
Quentin 36
Joe 32

The offer of another quick game was declined by Sam who was suffering from daddy-fatigue and needed an early night, and so we went out into the sweet warm September evening with another season finished.

So, all that remains are the scores for these past three months. It's been another successful season for Adam, taking first in Points, ratio, absolute points (all points scored in a game added together) and in points weighted by length of game. Sam came second, and I scraped a third place position right at the end with my sudden run of form (three wins out of four). Hannah came first out of the irregulars, with Quentin a close second.

However, there was a surprise winner in the absolute points ratio in the shape of Paul, who scored an average 61.5 points in his two games. And Quentin won points ratio for games weighted according to length, showing his preference for long, involved tactical battles.

I won by points weighted by how well/badly players did last season, indicating that I made the best improvement in the last few months. But it's a sobering sight to see Adam in second place even on a leaderboard where he's penalised the most! Jonny won points ratio on this scale, coming away with a very creditable five points on average. Finally comes the Olympic style leaderboard, which shows Adam and Sam in first and second as usual, but also Hannah in third – clearly demonstrating her skill at table-top strategy and resource-management.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio	Absolute	Abs ration	Weight	Wt. ratio	Length	Lth. ratio
Adam	24	116	4.83	1071	51	69	4.31	88.3	3.68
Sam	26	107.5	4.13	982	42.7	67	4.19	84.5	3.25
Andrew	24	81.5	3.4	567	27	72.5	4.53	61.3	2.56
Joe	20	80	4	574	30.21	50.5	3.37	70	3.35
Hannah	10	44.5	4.45	504	56	21.5	3.58	30.9	2.81
Quentin	10	41.5	4.15	351	39	22	3.14	39.7	3.97
Steve	9	33	3.67	256	32	28.5	4.07	32.5	3.61
Jonny	7	28	4	284	40.57	25	5	26.5	3.78
Andy	2	7	3.5	120	N/A	3	N/A	4	2
Paul	2	6.5	3.25	123	61.5	6.5	3.25	4.75	2.38
Chris	2	5.5	2.75	116	58	5.5	2.75	5	2.5
Sally	1	3.5	3.5	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	0.88	N/A
Matilda	1	1.5	1.5	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	0.5	N/A

The Olympic leaderboard...

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Adam	11	9	4
Sam	9	6	3
Hannah	4	1	3
Joe	3	8	4
Andrew	3	2	11
Steve	2	0	4
Quentin	1	5	3
Jonny	1	2	2
Andy	0	1	1
Paul	0	1	0
Sally	0	0	1

Bringing the Taj to Bracknell

2011-09-27T09:35:00.015+01:00

image nicked off the net from somewhere

Last night Andrew, Paul and me (Sam) made the trip to Chris' house for a bit of extra-curricular gaming. Andrew and I warmed up in the car with a few word games so we arrived raring to break open Taj Mahal, as Chris had spent the afternoon swotting up and was keen to play.

But Chris had parenting duties to take care of first, so the three of us got a couple of games of Trans-Europa in while Chris' children stared through the kitchen door at us asking what on earth we were doing. As this is the same response we get from most adults we were well-drilled in justifying ourselves, but I'm not sure they were convinced.

Anyway, I - finally! - managed to win a game of Trans-Europa, taking the first game with some elán if I do say so myself:

Sam 1

Paul 12

Andrew 14

But then train-buff Paul called in his all his experience to bludgeon us - Andrew especially - into a pile of twisted iron and splintered sleepers:

Paul 4

Sam 11

Andrew 21

By now Chris had packed his children off into the dungeon of fluffiness and we were ready for the main event: Taj Mahal. I'd actually bought this game for Chris many moons ago, but only today did he pop open the cardboard bits. Deferred gratification allied to iron discipline, or indifferent waffiness? You decide.

As I hope we'll be playing this on a GNN night soon, here's a quick summary of the rules.

The game takes place over 12 rounds, each round represented by a region of India to be contested by the players. How? By playing colour-co-ordinated cards (there are four suits and each player is (usually) obliged to stick with the colour they first lay) and hopefully winning at least one of five categories - Elephants, Viziers, Monks, Generals, and Princesses - all of which are represented on the cards in various combinations. Win the Elephants and you get to pick up goods (more of which in a minute), win any other category and you get to place a Palace - placing a palace scores you a point, and making a chain of palaces through different regions during the course of the game will give you more points. Win more than one category - place more than one palace. Great. But remember you only get one point per region for palaces, so multiple palaces in the same region do not get you multiple points.

How do you win? By having the most of something at the point you withdraw from the bidding. Your used bidding cards go into the discard stack and you place a palace, scoring your point. You then replenish your hand by two cards from a display (or one if you're last to finish) and you're then done for that round. Watch the other players throw their cards down with abandon, possibly weakening their hand in the process!

Winning Viziers, Monks, Generals or Princesses will also mean you get a little character tile of the category in question. You only need to collect two identical tiles to trade them in (involuntarily) for a special card. The special cards can help you in different ways; extra elephants (always helpful) extra victory points (ditto) changing card-colour during card-play (normally forbidden) and an extra Grand Mogul.

Oh, the Grand Mogul. He's a category but unlike the others he doesn't give you a tile or win you a special card. What he does is allow you to place a palace in the region (and score for it as normal) but rather than being tied to available spaces you can place the palace on any space you like - even an occupied one. The benefit of the Grand Mogul is really the fact it can help you make chains of regions even after someone has tried to block you.

So the special cards are very helpful, and unlike normal cards you don't have to discard them after bidding. But you can - and will - get them pinched off you by someone else when they get the two tiles needed to qualify for it. So the special cards can move around a little bit between players.

Back to Elephants then. They look like the poorer brother of the Viziers etc but actually they tend to be the most hotly contested category of all. Partly because they appear on the cards more than any of the other characters, and partly because when you win the Elephants, if you remember, you pick up goods. These score a point each, but crucially, pick up matching goods from another region and you not only score for the goods you picked up, but the chains of goods you're making. Pick up a rice to add to the two rice you already had and that's 1pt for your new good, and 3pts for the chain you've made. In a game of relatively low scores, these can be pivotal.

So that's about it. A couple of things about bidding though - the general rule is you bid one card at a time (and have to follow your own choice of suit) and wait for the bid to come back to you before either adding to your bid or withdrawing. But there are several white cards which are jokers, and you're allowed to lay one of these in addition to your suited card. Having a couple of these in your hand can be very helpful, as you can be a bit bossy with them about what you want.

If you withdraw from the bidding without laying any cards at all, you pick up three cards instead of the standard two. (Last out and you only get one, remember).

Finally there are some little extra chits dotted about randomly that will give you an extra card, an extra good, or an extra couple of points when you lay a palace on them. And finally finally the cards in your hand count for something at the end of the game - 1pt per white card (special cards and jokers) and 1pt-per-card of the suit you have most of.

We really liked it. Andrew did think that it encouraged card-hoarding, but I'm not so sure. If you're not laying cards, you're not picking up points, so it's more about trying to maximise what you get from as few cards laid as possible. If you only have 2 or 3 cards in your hand you'll look weak; if you have quite a few you'll look strong, so there's a little element of bluff to the game as well.

Chris led the game for most of it only to be caught on the final straight as I stampeded into round 12 on the back of my yellow elephants:

Sam 44

Chris 42

Paul 36

Andrew 24

I hope if we play it tonight we can be a little more grown-up about the euphemistic possibilities the game offers. Paul stating that "I can't beat Andy's little man, so I withdraw" had the rest of us sniggering like schoolboys.

We still had time for one last round of Trans-Europa - with 4 players this time - and again Paul came to the fore, finishing just ahead of me as Chris and Andy were swatted off the board:

Paul 3

Sam 4

Andrew 13

Chris 17

So, like the song goes, Reiner's done it again. Thanks to Chris for hosting, I was almost hallucinatory on the drive home so not sure I can make it a regular thing, but it was good to have a change of scene - and a change of game too.

From Stone to Chrome

2011-09-21T00:12:00.002+01:00

Imagine the scene. A prehistoric landscape. A tribe of hunter gatherers are tracking wildebeest for food. Suddenly there’s a rippling in the space-time continuum and, with senses alert, the Neanderthals are able to make out the words “Fucking Hell!!” drifting towards them from across the millennia.

That would be Quentin, who took a while to get his flicking skills under control this evening, for half the table had chosen Ascending Empires as one of the games of the evening. There were seven of us – six regulars plus a new face to be carved on the Games Night News mountainside: Andy. We split into groups of four and three. The four of us (myself, Joe, Quentin and Steve) chose gleaming hi-tech Ascending Empires. Sam and Adam taught Andy the joys of Stone Age. I’ll leave it to them to give a fuller report of Andy’s debut in the comments. Meanwhile, these were the scores:

Adam 145
Sam 123
Andy 120

With two old hands (Steve and Joe) and two newbies (me and Quentin) the rules of AE were quickly explained before we set off into the galaxy. At first it was a very cordial affair until I made the mistake of choosing to approach an un-colonized planet in Quentin’s quadrant. He took this to be an act of agression and so swiftly landed on the planet in question. Somewhat offended, I instead took a poorly defended planet of his, which then escalated into a war between the two of us, with neither wishing to lose face by backing down, yet also both of us aware that Joe and Steve were doing somewhat better than us.

Steve started well and stayed that way. He even had time to offer me advice, and also casually give away the colour of a still-to-be-identified planet. By the end of the game he had a big spaceship and it would’ve been more effective with more accurate flicking. But it was Joe who really suffered from “twitch-finger”. He spent two whole turns trying to land two ships on a barely-defended planet of Quentin’s but only succeded in going around it in eccentric orbits until Steve came along and calmly shot him out of the sky.

When the game ended, Steve was a clear winner with Joe a relatively comfortable second. I credit my third place to mining, which is all I could do in between fighting off hordes of Quentin’s space fighters. Quentin came fourth, but proclaimed that he’d enjoyed the evening. I also enjoyed Ascending Empires, but for such a fast moving game, it’s quite long, and I found it a little tiresome towards the end. Perhaps I was just battle-weary. But Joe’s comedy flicking is certainly worth seeing.

Steve 30
Joe 20
Andrew 18
Quentin 14

The Stone Age had long since passed by the time we’d ended Ascending Empires, and they’d managed to squeeze in a game of Tsuro.

Sam
Andy/Adam

With time running out beofre the end of the season, you have to say that Adam has it all wrapped up at the top. Meanwhile, Steve takes the hotly disputed 7th place from Jonny while Andy crashes in at number 9.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Adam	23	111	4.86
Sam	25	103.5	4.14
Joe	19	78	4.11
Andrew	23	75.5	3.28
Hannah	10	44.5	4.45
Quentin	9	37.5	4.17
Steve	9	33	3.67
Jonny	7	28	4
Andy	2	7	3.5
Paul	2	6.5	3.25
Chris	2	5.5	2.75
Sally	1	3.5	3.5
Matilda	1	1.5	1.5

A Flicker of Interest

2011-09-15T22:48:00.008+01:00

Joe and I were so enthused by Ascending Empires on Tuesday we arranged an absurdly-short-notice (and hence non-leaderboard) game on a Thursday evening.

It's such a weird game that combines brain-draining tactics with flicking spaceships around, but - if you don't object to the theme, which is kind of high on the geeky scale - it seems to work.

Certainly it worked for Hannah and Joe, anyway, who tied for the win on victory points (Hannah taking it on points won during gameplay). And Adam might well have been up there too, but for an early period were all of us took chances to attack as he left his planets ill-equipped to see off incoming discs of brightly-coloured plastic propelled by the spectral hands of cosmological deities.

I found the 4-player version a headier proposition than three, and after a decent start, faded dramatically as both Adam then Hannah blocked my routes to developing research centres - and hence scoring points. Again I was reminded of Agricola and how when your best-laid-plans are scrunched into an unforgiving ball you have to adapt and overcome, to borrow an unlikely bit of terminology from the marines.

Anyway, after much laughter at Joe's stage-fright when it came to flicking, he - unintentionally we assume - lulled us into thinking he must be doing very badly, but he very nearly took first place from Hannah, who seems to adapt to games frighteningly quickly. Adam (4th) and I (3rd) were some way behind them:

Hannah 26 (wins on gameplay points)

Joe 26

Sam 20

Adam 16

For me at least, this is a winner. I don't know yet if it'll remain so or go the way of fleeting favourites Dominion and Medici, but certainly it's worth a few more games, if only to watch Joe warming up his whole body before he flicks his tiny spaceships... either 2cm into nowhere or straight off the board.

One table, two millennia

2011-09-13T23:41:00.004+01:00

Six gentlemen stood around Sam’s kitchen table this evening for tonight’s combatitive entertainment. This suggested two games of three players, and while one half sped off into the future, the other half turned back the years and ventured into history.

Sam, Joe and Steve chose gleaming science fiction, with Ascending Empires – a game that promised 60-90 minutes on the box, but which took up most of the evening. I shall leave it for others to explain the various cries of victory and defeat, and Joe’s constant moaning about “the yips”, but the scores were:

Sam 39
Joe 29
Steve 24

It certainly sounded like more fun than our somewhat academic battle of wits. Quentin, Adam and myself (Andrew) chose the more sedate, more homely and more carciogenic lifestyle of tin miners in Cornwall with Tinners’ Trail. After a brief refresher on the rules, we began to explore our somewhat water-logged tin mines.

The first round saw us all scoring pretty evenly, but then Adam took a bold decision in round two and chose not to turn any of his points into victory points. Certainly, I’ve seen games in the past when not scoring in a round had no ill-effects in the long term, but this time it was to prove costly. Quentin and I scored sensibly in each round to balance out Adam’s last minute flourish. As it was, I couldn’t tell who’d won at the end, and after a couple of recounts and rechecking of rules, the final scores were announced:

Andrew 99
Adam 96
Quentin 88

A great game, and not just because I won...

Okay, yes: because I won. This was my first first place of the season, and well deserved, even if I do say so myself. But by the time we’d ended hundreds of years of Cornish mining, the other half of the table had barely got out of their own space quadrants, so Quentin suggested a little something that he brought along.

Dancing Dice is a curious version of liar dice, only in this game you split your six dice into two groups of three, hoping that they won’t come last when compared to other people’s dice. Because if you do come last, then you drop down the scoring track towards zero. Initially, us new boys (Adam and me) fell into second and third but I managed to put together some smooth moves and halt my decline while Adam crashed out earliest, putting him in third. I then decided to get up (get on up), as Quentin blamed it on the boogie as he fell past me and off the scoring track into second place. This gave me my second win of the evening, and an unfamiliar desire to rush home and write up the blog.

I had to wait for Ascending Empries to finish, though, as there were still victory points to be won before the game could end. Once it did, we all said our goodbyes and set forth into the cool autumn evening.

The leaderboard shows that despite Adam’s continuing bad run (only one win in his last eleven games) he increases his lead. No one changes places – Steve couldn’t overtake Jonny and I am still one and a half points behind reclaiming my third place. But at least my points ratio is a bit more healthy.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Adam	21	102	4.86
Sam	23	94.5	4.11
Joe	18	73.5	4.08
Andrew	22	72	3.27
Hannah	10	44.5	4.45
Quentin	8	35	4.38
Jonny	7	28	4
Steve	8	27.5	3.44
Paul	2	6.5	3.25
Chris	2	5.5	2.75
Sally	1	3.5	3.5
Matilda	1	1.5	1.5

There's Always Agricola

2011-09-12T14:35:00.007+01:00

I had some kind of mini-epiphany as Andrew and I surveyed the games cupboard on Sunday night - when did I inherit the mega-geek status I now occupy? For years I just owned Settlers of Catan, Serenissima and Robo-Rally. Then Carcassone sneaked in, then suddenly - thanks to Joe, who opened my eyes to the cornucopia of games out there - the cupboard is full. To the point where I now have to jettison games before I can buy new ones. (I did some trading today to get Taj Mahal:

)

Before I could sink further into ponderances over the rich tapestry of time, though, Andrew suggested Agricola and before you know it I was wondering if I should invest in those custom meeples...

I have games I would probably select before this; but Agricola remains a classic for me. I love the basic game and the fact you can add card decks to it to make it more intricate is obviously appealing too. It was hard to call which way this was going to go - Andrew embarked on a spree of card-playing whilst I ploughed shitloads of fields and grew more corn than I knew what to do with. Last time we'd played a 2-hander Andrew had played a lot of cards and I'd won, but his strategy was more water-tight this time, allowing him to build lots of stone houses and getting bonus points for them to boot. Both of us struggled to feed our nascent families and had to sacrifice innocent animals to the pot before they could breed, ending the game with a lot of empty pastures and carnivorous tendencies. I thought I might be in with a shout of victory, but Andrew's nifty card-play and my over-concentration of corn meant he finished in a clear first place:

Andrew 39

Sam 26

Very different game with two than 3-4 players of course, because it's easier to come up with a Plan B with your intentions are stymied by the other player. But still, a level of creativity and intrigue that's rare in gaming. Others may tickle our fancy, but Agricola remains a high water-mark of gaming.

Year of the Berger

2011-09-09T10:30:00.004+01:00

Thursday, Joe's house, 8pm. Myself (Sam), Adam, Hannah and Joe himself embark on what will become the most tragic year of Chinese history - The Year of the Dragon, as distilled into game form by Stefan Feld - the twelve months of the year becoming twelve rounds of game time.

A series of catastrophes will befall our culture that we can only try and negate with the weapons to hand - medicine, food, builders, and the odd firework. To cheer everyone up, I suppose.

The rules explained to debutant Adam, we were away. And from the off I was reminded that The Year of the Dragon is one of those games where you can never do all the things you want to; the game strategy is about making the right choice that will not just protect your people (the way I played it the first time) but will move you along the scoring track at the same time.

Having seen Joe take 'privileges' early on in his victorious campaign of a couple of weeks back, I did the same. I also focussed on the thing that would move me along the score track - Knowledge - and the thing that would allow me to pick up that knowledge - Money. But despite moving into the lead around April my game-plan was about to implode: I had naively used my wild cards early on and come Autumn my choices on people management were severely limited - a fact I completely forgot during one particularly catastrophic round were I intended to pick up some medicine only to find the doctor wasn't in.

While I was firefighting a losing battle, Joe's firemen had extinguished all threats and were hosing each other down for fun. Joe had managed to build lots of buildings (Hannah and I had two, Adam three) and had a stack of money and rice in front of him. Sure, he threw the odd person out into the elements as a sacrifice, but it was for the greater good. Come the tail end of the year he sailed past me into the lead and during the final scoring - when your people are scored - he obliterated the competition. I sunk back into fourth, having ended the game with a solitary empty house, prompting Joe to actually apologise to me as he added on point after point. You know you've played a terrible game when people are sympathetic.

Hannah was third, and Adam, who had expanded his houses a little and diversified better than I did, claimed a very respectable second. I was frustrated by my experience but it's hard to say whether it was the game's now-solve-this mechanics or my bad management of them. I'd be willing to play it again, but that might be motivated by revenge rather than enthusiasm.

Joe 96

Adam 76

Hannah 70

Sam 61

It had just gone ten when we finished, so we decided on a short (three rounds) game of Poison. And despite Hannah's vagueness with the rules she swiftly got herself into pole position after round one, and didn't relinquish it, finishing the game with an impressive six points as Adam and Joe tied for third and I claimed second:

Hannah 6

Sam 8

Adam/Joe 21

Which means as far as the leaderboard is concerned Hannah and Joe did best with 1st and 3rd placings, Adam trod water and I took a mouthful of chlorine.

The leaderboard...

	Played	Points	Ratio
Adam	19	95	5
Sam	22	89.5	4.07
Joe	17	69.5	4.09
Andrew	20	62	3.1
Hannah	10	44.5	4.45
Quentin	6	28	4.67
Jonny	7	28	4
Steve	7	24.5	3.5
Paul	2	6.5	3.25
Chris	2	5.5	2.75
Sally	1	3.5	3.5
Matilda	1	1.5	1.5

Andrew here. As we enter the final few weeks of this season, Joe has squeezed past Sam in terms of points ratio, and also moved up into third. However, despite Sam's bleak performance, all is not lost. He still has half a chance in coming first both in the regular leaderboard and in the Olympic-style one (seven golds to Adam's ten).